Issue 5.2
Spring 2026
To Carry the Lamp Without Complaint: Deborah Keenan’s The Saint of Everything
by Su Love
The Saint of Everything
Deborah Keenan
LynxHouse Press, 2023
(distributed by Washington State University Press)
Deborah Keenan’s The Saint of Everything is a virtuoso book of poetry, playful and serious, about how lives are lived whether by neighbors, murderers, lions or saints. This is the tenth book of poetry by Keenan, who has won numerous awards including an American Book Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Foundation. When I asked another poet, what do you think is the key to this book, she reached over to turn the pages in my hands, tocked her finger onto page four and read aloud,
To carry the lamp without complaint.
“That’s it,” she said.
The Saint of Everything astonishes with its visions, nightmares and protected memories. Its delineations and powers of certain animals. Its cast of thieves, murderers and the Wicked Who Meant Their Wickedness and their violence. That they have saints just as competent as the saints of the innocent, the tree and Those Who Abide. Above all, what is most astonishing about The Saint of Everything is its spiritual or philosophical (your choice) reoccurring resolution about how to live a life. What is most astonishing is its piercing admissions, its reception and acceptance of, well, everything.
Henri Cole, in Gravity and Center, writes how important it is to “have an aesthetic power while writing about the tragic situation of the individual in the world.” Keenan does exactly this. Aesthetic power sounds down through the poems in music and voice, telling details, urgent syntax and exquisite turns of thought. “Returning at the End of Suffering” illustrates this power as well as Keenan’s tragic sense of life and its enduring mysteriousness.
A fierce loyalty to the world as it gives itself to us, with all its terrors, sorrows, elations and beauty, hums from beginning to end of The Saint of Everything. In the opening poem, “The Thief,” we see that although he has handled and marked the most intimate and vulnerable things, the thief has, like an installation artist, gifted an imperative for how to live. In the closing poem, the poet practices her commitment to acceptance by receiving songs from strangers.
As I navigate a life on this ravaged gorgeous planet, in these terrifying political times, among beloved people and animals, I find inspiration in the whole of The Saint of Everything. This strikingly clear and imaginatively mysterious book asks and answers the question of how to live with wisdom and grace.
Deborah Keenan attended Macalester College, and worked in and directed the Minnesota Writers and Artists in the Schools Program. She was managing editor at Milkweed Editions, taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of St. Thomas, guest taught at St. John's University and was a professor for thirty years at Hamline University in its MFA and MALS graduate programs. She founded the Laurel Poetry Collective. She is the author of ten collections of poetry, a book of writing ideas, and received the Minnesota Book Award for Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems
Su Love is the author of six collections of poetry; The Memoir of Mona Lisa and Other Poems is her most recent. Love thanks Sara Dovre Wudali, Jim Moore, Kelly Mowrer and Suzanne Swanson for helpful conversations.