An Inheritance of Stone

From the introduction:

Some poems in this book gallop and kick. Some swerve elegantly like an escape pod caught in a gravity well. Other roll quiet as a child’s blanket. The words in these pages won’t seem the same each time you read them. They will be just what you were looking for, but nothing that you expected.

- Lucy A. Snyder, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection Chimeric Machines Praise for An Inheritance of Stone

The poems in An Inheritance of Stone ponder what it is to be human -- to be consciously conscious -- from diversely entertaining angles. Lava lamp chronicles, deluded horses, jaded rocketship captains, and a woman who turns into a diamond figure in this landscape of cheerful disillusionment. Leslie Anderson can be simultaneously candid and canny, moving and funny; her narratives take astonishing turns; her restless curiosity leads her to explore frontiers uncommonly broached in poetry. This book introduces a surprising and engaging new voice.

- J Allyn Rosser, author of The New Criterion Poetry Prize-winning poetry collection Foiled Again

Merging her fascination with images of the space age and cowboy/equine lore, Leslie Anderson gives a quirky personal vision of the contemporary world where "America is a boy with long hair/ Who holds cigarettes like a burden" and who tells us we can be anything we desire "but first you have to be sad for 200 years."

- Diane Wakoski, author of the William Carlos Williams Award-winning book Emerald Ice.

Many of Leslie Anderson's poems dramatize her discoveries of the frightening spaces between individuals who might be supposed to understand one another intimately. In "Locks" and "My High School Boyfriend is Gay" there are secrets within romance that threaten the agreed-upon definitions of the relationships; and within the family, too, there are silences between daughter and parents -- in "Portrait" and "An Inheritance of Stone" -- that reveal the limits of love even when it is strong. Leslie Anderson in such poems deftly and touchingly evokes the wary alertness of a young woman trying to figure out what in the world can be relied upon.

- Mark Halliday, past winner of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship