Saint Serotonin: Poems on Love and Obsession

By Warsan Shire

The award-winning author of Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head returns with a poetry collection of chemical intensity, where love--or the fever-dream of it--threatens to consume the most precious parts of a self.

"Ya Allah if it / will keep my heart soft, please break / my heart everyday."

A woman meets a man. She carries, as we all do, the weight of her childhood, the story of her parents, the body she was born into. Endorphins race in her - their love is fated. But what comes next?

In Saint Serotonin, the world narrows to a single, ferocious flame of obsession. From the jitters of infatuation to the ecstatic wager of losing oneself in another, Shire paints an uncompromising and complicated portrait of a woman in love: "The only side effect is / nothing will ever be enough."

These are poems of reckless intoxication, devotion, abasement, tenderness, addiction. Sensual, subversive, perfume-scented yet horror-tinged, Saint Serotonin ensnares us in its intimate derangements. As our narrator fights her way back to herself, who will she be when she emerges?

This collection is at once a promise and a warning, an excavation of what it is to love and be loved.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593979672
• ISBN13: 9780593979679
• Release Date: May 2027
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.