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9781949487237

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"""From the pen of one who has known loss, the fearless poems in Dressing the Bear look from many angles at how the 'world. . . takes you hostage.' But this is not a book about grief; it is the act itself. The poet grieving, laments the limits of language even as Leary pushes them. Among the tangles of remembering and enough blame to go around, she invites us to moments of transcendence: her brother 'stretching the ghost of his boyhood into a god, ' 'a holiness at the end of day. . . like waning light looking back at me, ' and 'birds. . . washing their feathers with water from our eyes.' Find in these poems an ache much like the one you harbor, a search for 'afterglow, ' and small promises of new light."" - Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16 ""There is nothing faint-hearted in Susan L. Leary's, Dressing the Bear, a book-length elegy to her dead brother. These are poems made from grief, from the 'mercy of animation, ' from bones, wings, water, and a 'dress sand-colored with splotches of blue.' Leary writes directly into the pain of her brother's addiction, incarceration, and death. She does not seek ease; she seeks the grief itself and asserts that 'a body is built to be antagonized by God.' Yet, this gorgeous book, that made me weep, teaches that the only way out of pain is through, and Leary moves through: fearlessly, with beauty."" - Jessica Cuello, author of Yours, Creature ""Grief is deeply strange and disorienting and life altering. This collection of poems, dedicated to a lost brother, unfolds the sorrow we are often taught to bottle up. In this impressive book, Leary balances on that wary edge between mourning and imagination, between moving forward and rewinding the past. These elegies absorb and concede the finality of death while miraculously keeping the beloved brother present and pulsing."" - Matt Rasmussen, author of Black Aperture, winner of the Walt Whitman Award/Finalist for the National Book Award"

Author Information

Susan L. Leary is the author of three previous poetry collections: A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Tar River Poetry, Superstition Review, The Arkansas International, On the Seawall, Tahoma Literary Review, Cherry Tree, and Pithead Chapel. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies, and recently she was a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize; a finalist for the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize; a finalist for Midway Journal's -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest; and shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. She holds a B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN.

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