Liquid Like This, Poems by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Few poets are as raw and yet formal as Leslie Anne Mcilroy. Out of the deepest emotions, sometimes wrenching, sometimes embracing, Mcilroy creates poems of perfect shape and rhythm. Liquid Like This is both a testament to experience—felt, embraced, lived—and her gifts in rendering that experience.
Sample Poems by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
“The poems of Leslie Anne Mcilroy have always displayed her agile two-sided touch. In Liquid Like This, she intensifies this talent for seeking and seeing both sides of truth, bridging the beautiful and the profane. Like Tom Waits’ baby sister and Neruda’s grand-daughter, her new gritty narratives seduce as easily as they caution; soothe as easily as they trouble. They ‘make a mark on [our] silence, / tell [us] something holy and born’ about the poetry of desire.”—Terrance Hayes
“Leslie Anne Mcilroy’s poetry is honest and direct, like a conversation with a good friend who tells the truth. Her most visceral work is also her most courageous. These poems are brimming with passion and energy, indeed the stuff of life itself.”—Martín Espada
“Leslie Anne Mcilroy says: ‘No matter what you say, I hear the truth.’ And she does. Then she speaks it back to us—double. She leads us to the shine of it, the deep, dark unspeakable of it. Liquid Like This opens the mouth of story and drops us into the wetness—there is no periphery, there is no extraneous—and here we are, surrounded by the celebrated, flawed body where the clitoris plays the main role and we’re in the world of foreskin/not foreshadow, with no before/no after: only voice, a woman in the midst of a life lived real.”—Jan Beatty
“In a city/literary neighborhood/sexual terrain recognizable as home, Mcilroy gives us an organic voice, outside academia, claiming female autonomies unimaginable to most women a couple generations ago. She does so within scrupulously and movingly crafted poems of dark beauty, lit from within by love’s painful, inescapable knowledge, ‘past and passing and to come.’ The struggle for money—a palpable backdrop—authenticates the poems’ urban bluesiness. Smart, often wise, even dressed-to-kill wise, the mix of things that make up this book are anything but formulaic, making the life and death stakes of the everyday—the impossibility of this sort of book, this sort of woman’s life—familiar to us all.”—Linda McCarriston
Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her poems are published in numerous journals and anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, The Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Pavement Saw and Pearl. Leslie was the cofounder/editor of HEArt — Human Equity Through Art — the nation’s first journal devoted to promoting social justice through literature and art, and works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA where she lives with her daughter Silas.
ISBN: 978-1934999165, 84 pages, $18.00