To Feel Less Alone: Interview with the Poet, Megan Pinto, a Rising Star

Simply put, Megan Pinto has written perhaps the most moving poetry debut of the year.

Titled Saints of Little Faith (2024, Four Way Books), Pinto’s book explores lasting themes of love and the march of time while delving into family history and painful memory.

In these poems, many of which take place in New York, Pinto is a chronicler of hardship but has the broader goal of connecting with readers.

Raised in Raleigh but based in Brooklyn for nearly a decade, the early-30s poet first became enamored of the form as a student at Ohio Wesleyan University.

“When I started my undergrad, I wanted to take a fiction class but all of the upperclassmen signed up, so then I signed up for the poetry class and I absolutely fell in love with it,” Pinto says.

“In college,” she continues, “it was Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband. That was the first book of poetry I read where I was so blown away. I was like, ‘Whatever this is, I want to learn how to do this.’ And, in a way, that kind of really shaped the course of my education because that was the feeling that guided me.”

She also said she enjoys coming-of-age novels, and in an interview with Rampus said her two favorite books in high school were F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She also writes about her own coming-of-age experiences, past lovers, dealing with her Catholicism and tending to her father as he battled a long illness.

The poem “Unfolding” opens with the line: ”I let a boy kiss my paper skin because he told me I was pretty.”

It concludes: “I miss Ohio when it rains. In college, I would drive out past the fields, down the empty highways, two lanes flagged with fences, cows ambling, sun setting, sky growing pink.

“A secret: I let a man undress me because he wouldn’t stop kissing me, and though I found him to be beautiful, my mind moved to light shifting among trees, fields unfolding.”

Pinot is building a reputation as a rising star among serious modern poets. She won an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and was awarded the 2023 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers Conference, Storyknife Writers Retreat and The Peace Studio

In October, following the publication of Saints of Little Faith in September, Pinto returned to her college as an author and felt particularly gratified.

“I just remember being on campus—the last time I was there was graduation—and I had all of these hopes and dreams, so it was really special to come back having achieved some of them,” she says.

Pinto’s success stems from her dedication to her craft. Following guidelines in the seminal handbook The Artist’s Way, Pinto wakes each day and does a “brain-dump,” as she calls it, where she writes whatever is on her mind.

“I try to start every morning with a little bit of reading and writing, usually some free-writing first, even if it’s for five minutes,” she explains.

“In the morning,” she adds, “I haven’t really been texting that much, the world hasn’t gotten in, and so it’s just me and language. And that, to me, is where you can get into that meditative space of really just receiving. That’s where inspiration comes from because you, or I, can see, and am better able to see beauty.”

Saints of Little Faith brims with this beauty. Comprising poems that Pinto wrote over a four-year period (2018-2022), the collection showcases her sharp eye for detail and humanist approach.

Like C.K. Williams’s Repair or Carl Phillips’s Wild Is the Wind, Saints of Little Faith mines the profound out of the mundane and, though sometimes sad, is finally restorative.

Pinto’s poems, in fact, span a range of emotions, from melancholy to joy, but are always in the service of forming a bond with readers.

“ . . . When he recalls these days,” goes a poem about her ailing father, “I do not know what to say, but I stay/on the phone and we breathe. He tells me: /You know, I hate hanging up the phone./Whenever I do, I’m alone.”

In only a few lines, in a mere moment, Pinto has given a glimpse into a particular father-daughter relationship and, in the process, achieves an undeniable resonance.

There is also the standout poem, “Original Sin,” which goes, “Math willed me/into logic, but I wanted intensity. I thought sorrow could transform me.”