05/22/2024
Tomorrow, May 23, is pub day for If in Some Cataclysm. It’s now available for purchase from Glass Lyre Press. I’ll have more info tomorrow about how to order a signed copy with a bookmark directly from me. Tomorrow, I also hope you’ll join me along with Kai Coggin, Lisa Fay Coutley, Sara Henning, and Lynne Thompson to celebrate our five new books—zoom link sign-up in first comment.
And now, for more backstory on this collection. In February 2020, I headed to Ragdale to start a sabbatical. I was exhausted and hadn’t been writing. The previous fall, my husband survived a health threat that kills or significantly disables 2/3 of people. The first two days of my residency, I spent shivering and achy in bed, with little red dots appearing on my legs, all of which I realized in hindsight was a reaction to the shingles vaccine. I feared I’d need to leave. I called my doctor back home. People brought me food—Linda Williams is Ragdale’s amazing chef. I bounced back quickly. I stayed.
I went to the closet under the stairs, printed old poems, and laid them out on the bed to see what I had accumulated. There were some strange, judgmental poems about middle age, and I noticed some centers and intervals mentioned in some much older poems. I gave myself an assignment for the rest of the residency: write about middles.
This idea was arbitrary. It felt dumb and simple, but I wanted to try this exercise. I’m the person who never stretches before or after exercise, and exercise has never felt habitual to me. To hold myself to it, I told my fellow residents. I remain ever grateful that Annia Ciezadlo, Kathy Fish, Rebecca Entel, Oliver Caplan, Kenny Nguyen, Richard Pasquarelli, Danny Thanh Nguyen, Alison Welford, Laurie Kahn, and Gina Frangello said, do it. Had it not been for for this bunch of artists, I probably would have talked myself out of it and remained stuck. Each of these individuals is amazing, and if you’ve read this far into the post, I hope you click on some of their names to see what they’re doing. At the end of February, we left and, within days, were isolating in our pandemic homes.
If in Some Cataclysm is a book entirely of middles. In medias res, the Middle Ages and middle age, the middle bones of your fingers and the middle ear, the meantime, the mid-decade. These poems are also critiques, angers, frustrations—there is so much wrong with the human world! We need to admit these wrongs, call them out, sit with them, even or especially when we have contributed to or continue to perpetuate them. And yet, these poems ask us not to give up on ourselves or each other.
If in Some Cataclysm is a universe in which “so much desired of each other and not enough of ourselves” is the norm. Anna Leahy’s poems remind us that “to be born is to be defined by what one is not and what one is also not,” echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather be...
