forthcoming May 2024
from Glass Lyre Press
From what vantage do we see? Anna Leahy’s new collection establishes a most intriguing perspective: the middle. These poems reckon with decades and centuries from their centers, measuring personal traces and the historical in-between. Throughout, we “top it off and race to the bottom.” The middle is actively made and remade for us. Plucky, aphoristic, and logical by turns, Leahy delves into issues of fertility and physical bodies to find a great richness in the midst and the half, those sometimes murky divisions of life and death. If in Some Cataclysm exhales into it, knowing “a space must be waiting to contain / all our possibilities.”
—Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of Worn Smooth Between Devourings and An Eye in Each Square
If Some Cataclysm is a universe in which “so much desired of each other and not enough of ourselves” is the norm. Anna Leahy’s poems remind us that “to be born is to be defined by what one is not and what one is also not,” echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The tenacity of Leahy’s poetry pushes me to “the brink” in the face of a sharp reality we’ve created. I’ll be reading this book again and again.
—Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion, the Barrow Street Poetry Prize Editors’ Choice
Sample Poems from If in Some Cataclysm
Thorax: this arrhythmia
Anapaca Review
Navigation by Falling Stars & Gloss
Poetry International Online
Dear 1975—
museum of americana
A Doctrine of Clock
Bear Review
Other Books
Gloss
The Laurel Review
What Happened Was:
Small Harbor Publishing
Tumor
Bloomsbury
Aperture
Shearsman