Aperture

Anna Leahy's generous poetic imagination encompasses women from Marie Curie to Esther Williams to Elizabeth Siddal, poet Felicia Hemans to the mothers of the characters in The Wizard of Oz, a lighthouse keeper and a plethora of saints. Leahy quotes Barthes: in order to look at [history], we must be excluded from it. It is through the rare courage of distance, both aesthetic and psychological, that the lovely, compelling poems of Aperture afford us their unique glimpse of an all-too-often-ignored female universe of inner and outer significance. - Annie FinchAnna Leahy's collection of poems, Aperture, is simultaneously focused in its subject matter about women and capacious in scope, not an easy feat. The book is an aperture or an opening into essential lives that may have been forgotten. There are persona poems and third-person lyric poems that investigate women-from the mothers in The Wizard of Oz, to artists and poets, to saints, to mathematicians, to astronomers, and much more-creating a chorus of unique, yet unified female voices. Leahy writes poems with such intelligence, concision, grace, and precision in terms of the line, language, and the word. Aperture is an arresting and necessary addition to the landscape of contemporary poetry. -Victoria Chang See more