Kelsi Vanada’s Optional Saint (Bench Editions) is a delicate collage of poetic styles that maintain a signature sparseness of language — the poems ask the reader to connect the dots. What’s interesting and exciting about Vanada’s poetry is that she trusts the reader and invites the reader to become part of the narrative. With brevity, with compression, Vanada creates a language and the reader achieves fluency as the book wears on.
I have now read Optional Saint nearly three times. The first third of the collection I reread almost immediately, sensing that I was not in the right place to read it when I began (I wasn’t; a waiting room full of distractions made me miss so much of what makes this book special). I read it all the way through after that and, then feeling energized and excited, I reread it the next day. I had other things to do and to read, plus I had a review to write, but reading Optional Saint made me want to read. It made me want to write. It made me want to play with and understand language.
These poems interrogate language, the church, the way our days are moved by the paradigms in which we live. Where some poems rely on imagery, even iconography, others are sonic and conceptual. In the poem “Virtual Sit Meditation,” Vanada opens a stanza with plain, conversational language and then weaves several images together into one bright metaphor, “My cold sores shouldn’t leave a scar, but they almost always do. / I say things like easy peasy. No worries, no hurries. But something’s always wrong / with my mouth. My brother, landing at night: Darker than you’d imagine, / like closing your eyes.’”
The connective tissue isn’t lost in these poems because she’s effectively taught you how to read her language. The repeated idea of translation serves to underscore the malleability and intangibility of language. With these reminders, each poem has a resonance that reaches into and beyond the next.
Vanada invites us to worship at the altar of understanding. She presents discordant imagery and phrases in different languages and she creates glimmering, exacting phrases that deserve to be studied on their own.
This book is essential for anyone who loves words (From the poem “Manual Acts,” “Workshop looked like worship, a mistake I’ve made before.” From “By and Large,” “You could pull from any number of passages, but you don’t…I make the translations again.” From “Transcription Pedal,” “A successful language is not / like a helpless one.”) but I want to force it into the hands of people who are reluctant to engage. I want to point to each poem and remind them what it is supposed to be. This book is a creative act. This book asks you to remember the stories you were told and confront them: How do they serve you now? How can you make something new?
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2025 issue.
