Description
Book SynopsisMonkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star, Gracie Leavitt's first full-length collection, draws on rich lyric history, the love poem as prism, in an effort to create a postmodern pastoral. Leavitt's lines-a baroque tracery, sometimes dark, teasing prose, and pronoun-packed-and unstoppable syntax define her unique poetic vision. This idyll, with its bucolic scenery, its domestic scale, its erotic charge, charges forward into an ecofeminist future.
Trade Review“Her heart has a huge vocabulary. The erotic frictions and syntactic torsions that make her work so exciting on the surface never linger in the abstract but always come close, close, inviting us into the play of feeling and, above all, the play of play.”—Robert Kelly
“Leavitt’s poems attune the reader to the frame of their viewership. Her “long distance thinking” informs a poetics simultaneously devoted to engaging and subverting meaning. The first and third sections of the book, entitled “Gap Gardening” I and II respectively, employ Rosmarie Waldrop’s concept of “gap gardening,” a mode of writing that cultivates discontinuity by bringing the gap offered by the margins of a poem into its body.”—Davy Knittle, Iowa Review
