My Lost Saints

James Davis May, the recipient of the 2026-27 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, is the author of the poetry collections Unquiet Things and Unusually Grand Ideas. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Macon, Georgia, where he directs the creative writing program at Mercer University.

"In this witty, keen-eyed, self-scrutinizing, and majestic collection, James Davis May summons his ghosts-his reluctant mentors, those 'lost saints'-and captures them in characteristic moments that are both large and small, fleeting and eternal. This book sheds a hovering depression and celebrates the world one poem at a time in a way that is so filled with spiritual longing, so dazzling and heartbroken, that it leaves me shaken and awed."-Edward Hirsch "When we speak to the dead, do they listen? And, if they listen, how do we discern when the dead are speaking back? James Davis May's My Lost Saints explores the many ways we reach for the dead through an intimate and moving collection of elegies for his beloveds and the many patron saints who watch over the commonplace, like traffic lights and suburbs. May's interrogation is as mystical as it is superstitious, but it is always turning in wonder toward the possibility of 'the absence and the presence / of the life that pulses on the other side.'"-Megan Pinto