Saint Serotonin

"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 after the miracle of love?

Warsan Shire is beloved for gently holding the tender parts of a diasporic generation: poems that truly see--and cry with and rage for--those scattered by war. Poems that peek into the hidden conversations between women that helped them survive. In Saint Serotonin, the world narrows to a single, ferocious flame of obsession. With an anatomist's eye, Shire paints an uncompromising and complicated portrait of a woman in love, from the jitters of infatuation to the ecstatic wager of losing oneself in another: "The only side effect: / nothing will ever be enough."

These are poems of reckless intoxication, tuned to desire's contradictory faces: devotion, abasement, tenderness, addiction. Sensual, subversive, perfume-scented yet horror-tinged, Saint Serotonin ensnares us in its intimate derangements, rich with indelible language and searing physicality: "Trust me, he loves me. / Have mercy, he loves me." As our narrator fights her way back to herself, who will she be when she emerges?

Featuring brand-new poems alongside some of Shire's most beloved pieces (including "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love") this collection is at once a promise and a warning, an invocation and an excavation of what it is to love and be loved.