More Flowers by Susan L. Leary

Quiet tensions drive this collection: the ox walking on ice and the voice box buried in a meadow, frayed wings grasping at the updraft. Leary offers More Flowers, pulling us close enough to inspect paradox, awareness, and the limiting roles women must play, all the while asking, “What, of any of this, is holy?” But these poems make a map toward a new kind of survival, warning us not to feed the stray cat, as “her hunger is what keeps her alive.” In the distance, Leary promises, is the waft of a glorious perfume—we’re simply asked to be careful as we advance, to remember “what the flowers have endured, before they were flowers.” —Allison Adair, author of The Clearing

If books were flowers, distinct and awesome in their beauty, Susan L. Leary has given us a bouquet of wonders. More Flowers toes the line between fiction and unrequited love, the Creator and the Mother: ruthless and meticulous constructions all. In this collection, girlhood is a trial by fire, a bullet aimed at the head, a girl rubbernecking the scene of herself, counting herself dead. With lyric deftness, Leary’s poems in More Flowers bristle with beasts: the swan, the ox, a bird named Ego, and at the center of it all, the animal woman folded in on herself while God watches, impassive and inscrutable as His miracles. Leary’s speaker is twin to that of W.B. Yeats, going out in search of her own face and yearning for a world uninterrupted by the illusory safety of marriage and the societal pressures to have children, more girls churned out into the charnel house. Leary’s poems are dark; good. To examine girlhood is to live in its inherent darkness: feathers pulled from the wings of birds; mothers apologizing to their girls through broken mirrors; the heads of flowers hanging low over their snapped necks.

–Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer, author of BAD ANIMAL

More Flowers is a celebration of girlhood and womanhood, richly complex, built from equal parts delicateness and fierce survival. Like “a girl stepping in & out of her wound costume,” Susan L. Leary’s poems affirm the many ways we bear and let go of grief. This collection is masterfully synergistic, struck through with precise, echoing images—animals, flowers, bones, blades—that both intensify and surprise. A wolf mother feeds on flowers, “the froth of tulips dusting her snout;” a human mother wraps the stems of lilacs “as if the limbs of angels.” Read this book for its beauty, its brutality, and its hard-won, revelatory blooms.

—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head