Saint Consequence

Michael M. Weinstein’s debut poetry collection, Saint Consequence, meditates on the body as a site of continuous change—both painful and beautiful, elected and imposed—to explore the often tangled journeys of physical and spiritual transformation. 

What does it mean to inhabit a body—and for that body to inhabit our shared world, in all its complexity? Saint Consequence attempts to mine the gap between a life seen from the outside and the realities of a life lived. Influenced by time spent living in Siberia, Weinstein draws on experiences spanning gender transition, chronic illness, and disability to explore the tensions between public perception and private truth. 

Ever wary of the temptation "to make a career of pain," (Adrienne Rich), these poems instead weave together personal experience and cross-cultural perspectives to invite us to reimagine our place in the world with greater nuance and compassion. Equally a personal reckoning and universal meditation on the complexities of identity, Saint Consequence expands from an examination of one man's singular experience of embodiment into a broader contemplation of the endless particularities of lives other than our own.

MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN is a transgender, crip poet, scholar, essayist, and photographer. His writing has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poets.org. A former MFA candidate and Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, he holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard and formerly served as a Fulbright scholar in Siberia. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.