Best Seller
Saint Serotonin
By Warsan Shire
By Warsan Shire
Hardcover
$24.00
Available on May 11, 2027 | 96 Pages
The award-winning author of Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head returns with a poetry collection of chemical intensity, where love—or the fever-dream of it—threatens to consume the most precious parts of a self.
“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.
“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.
Author
Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. She has written two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Shire wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award–winning visual album Lemonade and the Disney film Black Is King in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. She also wrote the short film Brave Girl Rising, highlighting the voices and faces of Somali girls in Africa’s largest refugee camp. Warsan Shire lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is her full-length debut poetry collection.
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