Brynn Saito is the winner of Red Hen Press’s 2011 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, and Drunken Boat, among other journals. Brynn was born in the Central Valley of California to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. She received an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in religious studies from NYU. Currently, Brynn lives in the Bay Area and teaches in San Francisco.

Other poems by Brynn Saito in Verse Daily:
September 10, 2012:   "Match" "You live in a house of sound and you live..."
December 2, 2009:   "Trembling on the Brink of a Mesquite Tree" "And the Lord said Surprise me, so I moved to LA...."

Books by Brynn Saito:

Other poems on the web by Brynn Saito:
"The Palace of Contemplating Departure"
"The Exile"
"Alma, 1942"
"Elegy with a Blue Wing"
"The Palace of Contemplating Departure"
"17 Again"

Brynn Saito's Website.

Brynn Saito on Twitter.

About The Palace of Contemplating Departure:

"From the first pages of this brilliant new book readers will find a tough and vital vision that goes well beyond the personal, touching on aspects of American life you won’t have found expressed with such contemporary freshness and verve elsewhere. In one of her poems Brynn Saito writes, ‘It’s done: never again in my life / will I be only one thing.’ It’s her strong sense of mutability, even metamorphosis, I find most compelling. Real poetry by a real poet—one I expect to be reading for years to come."
—David Mason

"The body is merely a cage for the radiant and otherworldly in Brynn Saito’s startling debut collection. The manifold selves created here reside deeply inside mystery. These poems are fully alive as they struggle between opposing forces of life and death, conflict and peace, gods and demons, darkness and light, the material and heavenly. This is a sacred internal travel, carving its mighty shadow on the world. How vibrant is the voice of Brynn Saito; how angelic, bestial, seductive, and divine. An offering of the highest order, written in sanctuary, a promise on the tongue, a litany of urgent prayers."
—Tina Chang

"The Palace of Contemplating Departure brims over with exacting and devastating details of terrain—of the ‘heart’s quick chirping,’ and of the ‘future, a bright coin spinning in sunlight.’ Saito proves a brave and whip-smart guide to recount journeys (both forced and chosen) around the word and the world. With a lyrical insistence gracing these pages, these alluring poems will both terrify and entrance in such a way that when you finally look up and close the book, you will have to wonder when and where you are. A dazzling and gorgeous debut!"
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil