Leah Poole Osowski is the author of hover over her (Kent State University Press, 2016), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize, and Exceeds Us (Saturnalia, 2023), winner of the Alma Award. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was a former emerging writer in residence at Penn State Altoona and is the poetry editor of Raleigh Review.

Other poems by Leah Poole Osowski in Verse Daily:
February 8, 2017:   "Vs. Field" "I could stare down    a field..."

Books by Leah Poole Osowski:

Other poems on the web by Leah Poole Osowski:
Two poems
"Motives Around Human Vacancy"
"Muted, Mutate"
"tied"

Leah Poole Osowski's Website.

Leah Poole Osowski on Twitter.

About Exceeds Us:

"As surrealism in its origins meant not unreal but more than real, a reality augmented by the world of chance and dream, Leah Poole Osowski summons, in Exceeds Us, not a supernatural but a supernatural earth: 'I am trying to invoke a life with an animal instinct.' In poem after startling poem, in language both beautiful and strange, the poet enacts an uncanny metamorphosis as she crosses the boundaries between herself and that of others—a lover, cicadas, reptiles, the sea. About this precarious earth of marvels and deep loss, of illness and intimacy, she says, 'I want to place all my altar stones on your cloudshadow.' I love this book, its sense of fascination and unease."
—Melissa Kwasny

"In a book haunted and energized by a lover's illness and, therefore, thoughts of death, Leah Poole Osowski's Exceeds Us concerns itself with what could be said, what we might be missing, and how limited we are in our creaturely bodies built first for survival but now repurposed for understanding and art and spirit. In just her second book, she has found her method and her madness both, and has fashioned a book that looks straight at a vanishing world, enumerating its wonders in language that is quietly stunning."
—Jon Davis

"Everything alive feels extra so in Leah Poole Osowski's riveting second collection, Exceeds Us. Every apricot or redbud, crocus or jay, me or you pulses and shape-shifts beyond ordinary boundaries. This is the land of otherwise. We know it from dreams, close to us as our own bones, and that deeply hidden. Image to image, line to line, these poems emerge like origami—each fold a new revelation—exactly this, then, surprisingly, exactly that, until, at last, we see clearly: this is a love story, 'a winged thing,' just what was needed. I found myself grateful to believe in these poems."
—Mary Ann Samyn