Saints of the Republic

Chip Livingston

 

ISBN 978-1-959556-02-2      80 pages         $16.00

 

 

Saints of the Republic is a stunning and magical work of poetry. Wrapped in eros and ethos, this new body of work is a body of metaphor, a body of testimony, and a body in prayer with another body. With flocks and exaltations, many gods to love, and a Baptist bodybuilder, these poems are a commitment to sound and image. The form is a letter to tradition and silence; they are born in verse and dressed up as an unlocked kiss. Expect to fall in love with these stories over and over again.

   Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

 

 

Saints of the Republic is an exultant song of queer identity, of history, of the present, and of the body. These poems celebrate the carnal, the elemental, the sacred and the profound. Chip Livingston strips away the pious and the self-righteous oppression of societal expectations and offers instead an invitation into the visceral. Here is a poet who has found his paradise in lovers, in language, and the land. He intimately shares a world so full of queer joy it begs the reader to look back at their own and take inventory.

    Sasha LaPointe, author of Red Paint and Rose Quartz

Chip Livingston is a queer/two-spirit, mixed-blood Creek writer and the author of two previous collections of poetry, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black and Museum of False Starts, as well as a chapbook of poems, a novel, and a short story/essay collection. He is the editor of Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.