Poems for Supper by Leah Stenson

In Poems for Supper, Leah Stenson serves up a feast of verse drawn from decades of love, longing, marriage, separation, and reunion. Plumbing emotional depth, these lovely lyrical poems trace a journey spanning continents and the complex terrain of a lifelong partnership. From youthful passion to the maturity of a mended bond, the poems are steeped in memory, myth, and quiet resilience. Poems for Supper is both deeply personal and universally resonant—a meditation on impermanence, endurance, and the poetry of everyday life. #poetry #marriage #love #aging #grief #memory #healing #Japan #life #longtermlove #relationships

Leah Stenson is the author of three poetry books—Heavenly Body, The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems, Everywhere I find Myself—and a hybrid memoir, Life Revised.  She served as a regional editor of Alive at the Center and co-editor of the award-winning Reverberations from Fukushima. She lives in Oregon’s Hood River Valley and hosts the Studio Series Poetry Reading & Open Mic in Portland.

With finely crafted fragments and vignettes reminiscent of Sappho, Leah Stenson’s Poems for Supper renders the jagged edges of a long-distance marriage, solo-parenting, and infidelity into something whole and exquisite, like the work of kintsugi. Savor these poems before the oncoming darkness.

-Scot Siegel, author of Tender Currencies, winner of the Dally Albiso Book Award

From the elegant dance of attraction, to coupling; from the ache of love’s absence, to tender reunion; these delicate, poignant, whimsical, and brave new poems by Leah Stenson capture both arc and essence of long and complex marriage. Here, through precise, lush imagery, where not one word is out of place, each poem – even when offering the “beauty of brokenness” – is its own celebration.  Poems for Supper will bear reading again and again, and each time, reader, you’ll find something new. It’s that good.

-Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong

In these honed poems, Stenson weaves the story of a relationship that lasts through separations and reconciliations, inviting us into a marriage with its share of cracks and shatters. Crossing back and forth, from the US to Japan and back, the poet invites us to consider how love is tried and yet endures: the couple copes with accident and illness, separation and tears, yet they come to mend each other’s hearts. Such poems of witness, hurt, and healing, are for anyone who has loved, lost, and loved again. A collection well worth reading, and rereading, for its lessons, its beauty, and its promise of hope through the storm.

-Judith H. Montgomery, author of Passion (Oregon Book Award for Poetry), Mercy, and The Ferry Keeper.