Dressing the Bear

(Trio House Press, 2024)

*Winner of The Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence

*Shortlisted for The Arthur Smith Poetry Prize

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, Leary 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, Judge, author of Ancient Light & Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2015-2016

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

A Buffet Table Fit for Queens

(Small Harbor Publishing, 2023)

*Winner of The Washburn Prize

“The Language of Women” reinforces and expands on a stance: in this poem and in this book, we are talking about language, this history of people who may have the ability to conceive, and we are talking about how words in men’s mouths have transformed women from full human beings to something less: “not even Mary can avoid the advances of God. & so every woman is a girl. Young girl. Servant girl.” Read A Buffet Table Fit for Queens, and you’ll own new ways of seeing our world. To quote Audre Lorde, “This is poetry as illumination.”

Laura Lee Washburn, Judge

Who benefits from the idea that life is linear? Susan L. Leary’s A Buffet Table Fit for Queens subverts the patriarchal origin story which clings to cause and effect, and instead invites us to forsake narrative for truth. Leary teases us towards temporal freedom, reminding us that death is “as vague as the color blue,” that every girl is “born    a ghost”, and that for women it’s always winter. Leary helps us envision the boundlessness of existence, an existence where no woman is expected “to ration   a nation’s / petals,” an existence where “Mary can avoid the advances of God.” Whether enjambed in a prose poem or floating in amniotic white space, Leary’s lines command their own plane. Luscious, intimate, and cutting, this collection has lungs. Let it change even the air you breathe.

Alexa Doran, author of DM Me, Mother Darling

Susan L. Leary’s new book, A Buffet Table Fit for Queens, is evocative, fierce, and unfailingly beautiful. Bearing witness to the female identity from conception to selfhood, it is a journey through a transactional world. “The unholy histories of a thousand dresses suddenly clamoring against skull & bone.” Leary creates a masterful mix of excavation and longing that savage preconceived roles. These poems are born in “The Language of Women,” yet haunt us with their marginalized voices. “A wolf howls & Mary is the chosen one. A wolf howls & in the back of a woman’s mind, not even Mary can avoid the advances of God.” Leary doesn’t leave us in the trenches, however. Her poems grow and build toward strength and discovery. “In turning from the mirror, I see my mother, seeing me as I have so badly wanted to be seen.” And it is in this remembered space that A Buffet Table Fit for Queens encourages the reader to let go and reexamine the conception of who we are and how we got there.

Sheree La Puma, author of Broken: Do Not Use