The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go (Csu Poetry Series, 61) (Csu Poetry Series, 61)

By Eliot Khalil Wilson and Cleo Qian

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880834588
• ISBN13: 9781880834589
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

The Best Poetry I've read in a long time.

I learned of Eliot Kahlil Wilson from a poem made available on RefDesk. I am taken with the compact lines, accessibility, and joy. The words flow and reach back to sounds and incredible images. If you like poetry even a little, get this book.

Long Overdue for Such Poetry

We're long overdue for such poetry." says Tim Seibles of Eliot Khalil Wilson's stellar debut. And we are. The poems in this collection are large of heart & mind. They are not elitists or obfuscators but generous, brilliant companions with sly, wry, souls, with dark visions, with grand, grand good will and wicked humor. When political, Wilson's work is never didactic, but never timid either. The poems feature complicated characters such as Isaac, "our Arab gunner...and just how mixed he was, dropping incendiary bombs and Hershey bars at the same time, Viet'smores we called it..." When damning and in despair--as when considering human cruelty in a poem about Vietnam called "Blank Verse for the Man we Threw from the Sky," the speaker humbly reminds us: "I'm not offended at our likeness: demon-apes, empty of everything else, prehensile hands, demon hands, just like mine." This collection is loaded with some of the most exacting imagery and some too, of the most gorgeous; yet the poems never shy away from the ugly, the mean, the unflattering descriptions and depictions when those seem most necessary. Necessary is what this book is--timely with the wish for mercy & the disappointed chaser to that wish at the world's tendency to cry out "the way a half-ruined thing cries out to be ruined utterly". From Virginia to Spain, from Wedding Vows to crucified Barbie dolls, from "mourning to morning", this book carries the reader through time, war, thrift shops, Mexican villages, love, a child's burn unit,strip clubs, bowling alleys, pecan groves, Vietnam, mortuaries, talk shows--even the Argentinas of the mind and the afterlife supermarket where Earl feeds on exotic fruits with the dead Uncle Brownie. The imagination is superb, the images flawless. An important, pressing collection.

Go Small Fish Go

It's hard to capture what these poems manage to catch with their well-cast lines. This book is articulate, sensitive and humorous. It's poetry that poets admire and yet it is able to be read and understood on some levels by any readers everywhere.

A good catch

The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go is well-seasoned, wicked smart on wry, with a side of love and collards.

Saintly

Eliot Wilson's The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go is one of the most accomplished books, first, second or ninth, I have read in quite a long time. I think the book's best recommendation is its fierce intelligence: the poems never lapse into sap or unearned sentiment. And its heart is fierce as well. The title poem is some kind of masterpiece, a re-invention of the elegy, making the form utterly contemporary. And all the other poems seem to breathe with real life, real energy. Great stuff.