Author Description

As the title suggests, Aperture opens gaps through which to see and hear the lives of imagined and actual women. This collection becomes a stage on which these women perform, and the poems play with notions of staging, with how we present ourselves and how we are perceived and represented by others. The stories and voices in Aperture "bend and come back again," telling the truth slant. "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 Finch