about If in Some Cataclysm
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. …The middle is actively made and remade for us. Plucky, aphoristic, and logical by turns… —Lauren Camp, author of Worn Smooth Between Devourings
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
If in Some Cataclysm speaks from and about the middle, the in-between, the interval, the middling. From the Middle Ages to Mid-Century Modern, from middle child to middle ear, through halves and couples, these poems take shape and make meaning. Each gloss catches truths and conundrums that fall through the sentences’ crevices. This book asks who we’ve been and who we are now—always becoming someone or someone else.
about What Happened Was:
What Happened Was: is the work of a poet at the height of her powers. Its architecture has a delighful variety… with sly surprise. This is a fabulous collection, confident and compelling. —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
You’ll be aware that you’ve been holding your breath until there are no more pages to turn. —Lynne Thompson, author of Blue on a Blue Palette
In Anna Leahy’s poignant chapbook, you see the speaker unspool the connective threads of messages and meanings into lyrical diadems. The poems in What Happened Was: reveal the finely hewn corners, sharpened to cutting. It is there where the poems contemplate power, silence, and the need to speak on history. —Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth
What Happened Was: documents gender disparities and sexual harassments in a series of ten poems that draw from the personal and the politicized. Interspersed are poems of other day-to-day slights, biases, and violences. This chapbook leaves room for the stories that are yet to be spoken.
about Tumor
In clear, compelling language, Anna Leahy writes with insight and empathy about cancer and the social and cultural dimensions of one of our greatest fears. A blend of science, journalism, and deeply personal storytelling, this book takes a lyrical approach to a complex subject we all face in some way.” — Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Leahy looks a tough subject right in the eyes, and tells its story with grace, insight, alacrity, and wit. —David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
One in two men and one in three women will develop invasive cancer. Tumors have the power to redefine identities and change how people live with one another. Tumor takes readers on an intellectual adventure around the attitudes that shape how humans do scientific research, treat cancer, and talk about disease, treatment, and death. With poetic verve and acuity, Anna Leahy explores why and how tumors happen, how we think and talk about them, and how we try to rid ourselves of them.