I picked this book up at the library based mostly on the cover art (a collage by the author) and the back cover blurbs, which talk about how these poems are, in the words of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “trafficking in the near-spoken, the peculiar particulars, and in the unseen textures of lived experience.” The twenty-three poems in the book are mostly short, generally a page or two long, though there are three longer works as well. The edition I read doesn’t have an author statement, but this blog post by rob mcclennan quotes from one in which Leslie talks about how the book uses collage as a technique, about how collage may “convey instability and collapse” but can also be “a kind of visionary or metamorphic medium.”
Mostly what I liked in this book were fragments, bits that cohered, rather than whole poems (though the poem called “I Meant to Write You a Letter” is an exception: it’s eight lines long and totally satisfying). I love the tightness of the language in the first numbered section of one of the longer poems, “Margaret Fuller,” which you can read in rob mclennan’s aforementioned post. I like this, from “The Age of Parts”:
One can take details from a still life
and render their motions
the hip of the glass
the body of the paint
“My desire is to argue/on behalf of the world,” says one pair of lines in “That Obscure Coincidence of Feeling,” and I like the bits of other poems that feel most like that, like bits of the world caught in words in ways that somehow resonate. I love the first three lines of “Something about Bundles”:
This is what you do
with a list
let the air in
And this, from “Poem with Moveable Parts”:
there is
the newly emergent
like a crush
a perfect piece
of air
how we dive into vessels
with our hands
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