Today's poem is "An Animal"
from The Heaven-Sent Leaf
Katy Lederer
is the author of the poetry collection Winter Sex and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers. Currently a poetry editor of Fence Magazine, she edited her own magazine, Explosive, from 1996 to 2006. Her honors and awards include fellowships from The Iowa Writers' Workshop, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in the borough of Brooklyn and worked for many years for a hedge fund.
Other poems by Katy Lederer in Verse Daily:
June 23, 2003: "Under Sweet Water Drowned" "Who hath forgotten aught they may be..."
Books by Katy Lederer: The Heaven-Sent Leaf (American Poets Continuum), Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers, Winter Sex: Poems
Other poems on the web by Katy Lederer:
Four poems
Three poems
Five poems
"In the Hole"
"The Tender Wish to Buy This World"
"A New Way to Live"
"A Sad Harp"
"Mandrakes"
Two poems
Four poems
Four poems
Katy Lederer's Blog.
Katy Lederer according to Wikipedia.
About The Heaven-Sent Leaf:
"Katy Lederer's The Heaven-Sent Leaf carries us through the cool halls of commerce into the richly impacted language of desire. In this architecture of financial and romantic speculation, tenderness brushes up against other things tendered. The result is not exactly an erotics of moneyor a balance sheet of love's trades and trade-offs—but a feeling for the shared roots of money and blood, lineage and 'brainwork,' poetry and speculation. The rich counter-tensions in these poems build with fugue-like intensity, driving our attention deep into the green-leaved groves of personal and global futures."
"Sparkling and strange, acrobatic but never evasive, clear-eyed about its own emotional life even as it takes semantics for a tumble, Katy Lederer's book-length sequence of not-quite-sonnets measures up to its contemporaries as a chronicle of love in and out of a life, in dramatis personae and in the poet's own soul. The Heaven-Sent Leaf excels all those contemporaries, and swerves away from almost all its precedents, in following at once the love and the money."
"These lyrically crisp poems chronicle the poet (gendered female) as 'brainworker' in contemporary New York. Where is prayer? Where nature? Where love? They are not to be found on the dizzying streetscape as seen from the top of an office building, but in the head and the heart of the poet buffeted by money-drenched dreams. 'I hate to be alone' Lederer writes, in the perfect 'Parable of Times Square.' But in this poem, and indeed this book, the remedy to the cold solitude of cash-getting is not other people but poetry."
Elizabeth Willis
Stephen Burt
Jennifer Moxley
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