In a haunting and dynamic passage which epitomizes her splendid lyric eye and ear, Stacie Leatherman writes of  “the multi-directional force of language/ which can’t fully be seen except for the bird/the color of yellow and red poppies, something that flutters/ near the diagonal, unmapped and undeniable…” I love the breadth and dynamism of her poems, and their willingness to inhabit the cusp between the domestic and the utterly strange. And, as the above passage attests, she understands that surrealism is a mode of restless thought--not a mere program. These poems offer, as Breton said a good poem should, a road to the absolute. Reader, you are in for a hell of a ride.

-David Wojahn

To travel from “elastic” line to “elastic” line in Stacie Leatherman’s Stranger Air is quite literally to travel where we haven’t been before, to breathe something unique, compelling, surprising. This is a world where things seem lost or on the verge of disappearing, a world where the speaker is always probing, uncovering, discovering. It is a world where she finds “particles of air water dust scattering /  light like chalk     the invisible making     something /  I could dream of weaving through my hair.” To make something of nothing, out of the pure air of imagination, but to make it so sensually, emphasizing touch, creating a world of things to fill the air, a world of tumbling metaphors and images is the essence of this superb book where every word is a metaphor for something unsayable that opens like “a drawer opened, shallow water clear to the bottom, a ghost, / cadaver on the med table, fish on the block, vivisection, / a sex opened, coquina shell, when I open my flesh to you.” When you open this book, you open yourself, and what you find will amaze and redefine you.

-Richard Jackson

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Stacie Leatherman is the author of two books of poetry and has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Caketrain, Crazyhorse, Diagram, elimae, and New American Writing, among others. She blogs things literary and ecopoetic at stacieleatherman.com. She lives with her husband and son near Cleveland, Ohio.