OPTIONAL SAINT
By Kelsi Vanada
The witty, playful poems in Optional Saint stretch sound to sound as they probe the intersections of creativity, translation, religion, and sexuality with curiosity and elasticity, asking: What do we inherit through family, language, and tradition, and what do we create anew? What happens when the sacred and profane collide? Here, nothing is fixed or reasonable, and transformation is an unending process: “A poem is only true in the moment, / and not in the next one.”
Kelsi Vanada is a poet and literary translator. She is the author of the collection Optional Saint (Bench Editions, 2024) and the poetry chapbook Rare Earth, and the translator from Spanish and Swedish of seven books of poetry and creative nonfiction, most recently Day’s Fortune by Carlo Acevedo, Basket of Braids by Natalia Litvinova, and United Left by Álvaro Lasso. Kelsi was a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and holds MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Translation Workshop. She is the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ. Find her online at kelsi-vanada.com.
Praise
Part spiritual exploration and part translator’s testament, Optional Saint is a radiant mosaic of faith, language, and the everyday. In poems that shift between liturgy and direct address, Kelsi Vanada reflects on the quiet splendor of cross-country meets in eastern Colorado, the comforting weight of a cat’s skull, and the elliptical transformations of language in translation. Each page hums with questions of devotion and doubt: How do we name the divine in an era of distraction? What does it mean to be “baptized” in a blow-up pool, or to yearn for closeness while maintaining a translator’s unflinching gaze? Vanada’s wit and warmth move hand in hand with her fascination for linguistic nuance. Line by line, she grafts borrowed texts and fleeting memories into a careful tapestry that reveals the messy, hopeful intersections of home, heritage, and spiritual seeking. Shot through with flashes of humor and luminous insight, Optional Saint holds space for the incomplete. Her act of questioning is its own kind of prayer—and a vital one at that. —Jack Saebyok Jung, author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus and translator of Thus Spoke Lady No by Kim Hyesoon
The poems in Kelsi Vanada’s Optional Saint play peek-a-boo with a mirror. Picture this: a hallway to the desert that leads to your interior. Listen here: thought’s private loop-de-loop lilting from an intercom. There’s company here among our non sequiturs, and what good, nervy company to keep. The Saint’s voice—hushed and raucous, a little lusty, trained on a wisdom that runs away from itself—is built from the “dirt of an idiom” and a questioning faith. Bristling with melancholic delight, these poems itch on the edge of a too-much: a portrait of my brain lit up as I am just about to sneeze. Of art, of God, of sex: she “wanted / to speak of it,” and I didn’t want to stop listening. —Kelly Hoffer, author of Undershore