Notre Dame, IN—In 2012, famed editor and writer Paul Elie asked in a New York Times essay whether fiction had lost its faith. More recently, Dana Gioia examined the disappearance of Roman Catholicism from its traditionally formative role in arts culture, asking, more or less, where the Catholic writer has gone. A new poetry anthology, like the character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, replies,“S/he’s not dead yet!”

St. Peter’s B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints is composed of poems whose speakers narrate in the messy here and now, but whose musings point to the great company of Catholic saints. The anthology boasts contributions from such contemporary award-winning poets as Dana Gioia, Mary Karr, Paul Mariani, Brian Doyle, Franz Wright, Judith Valente, and Kate Daniels, as well as many new and emerging poets. The poems invite readers to imagine the saints as they never have before: a mother trying to get her newborn to fall asleep, an older brother concerned about the marriage of his sister, a man’s memory of his involvement in a bar fight, a burn victim’s compassion for a small child.

Riffing on Flannery O’Connor’s incarnational view of art, Mary Ann B. Miller, editor of St. Peter’s B-list, reminds readers that “Christ’s humanity validates the natural world as wholly able to reveal to us the presence of the divinity within it.” Miller also distinguishes between artist and art: “I am making no judgment upon whether the author is a practicing Catholic, only that the content of these poems contains a basic underlying assumption that is essentially Catholic: the voices in these poems reflect belief in and hope for, often in spite of themselves, eventual union with God.”

Neither devotional nor pious, these poems capture how, in unexpected ways, the saints illuminate daily life for everyday saints-in-the-making and ask readers to see the action of God in their own lives.