Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint is a study in grief — a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present.

Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a “you” who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker’s androgynous self-awareness — and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies — disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation.

the lake has no saint will unsettle a reader’s sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately — in its vatic honesty — triumphant.

Stacey Waite is the author of three collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize), Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007), and the lake has no saint (winner of Tupelo’s 2008 Snowbound Chapbook Award). With both an M.F.A. in poetry and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh, Waite now teaches courses in writing, gender studies, and pedagogy as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.