This Girl, Your Disciple by Susan L. Leary

Some poets are lightbearers. Some poems possess the grace to heal. Susan L. Leary’s This Girl, Your Disciple is the luminous account of a terrible death; the family afterward wrestling with their angels, both dark and light; and the young writer herself appearing before us in brave strokes. The poems are stunning in their devotion, healing in the way they bear witness. This is the divinity of perspective…says the poet. The poem I want to write is the one I cannot. Here is a remarkable first book for all of us to breathe in: life-changing in its courage and in its beauty.

–Maureen Seaton, author of Sweet World

This Girl, Your Disciple begins with the life cycle of a blood-colored rose mallow from blossoming to withering end, “conscious, in the last breath, / of something missed.” What is missed is what Susan L. Leary laments in this excellent collection of poetry as she explores the legacy of her grandfather’s suicide, tracing the journey of her discovery and the need to understand. These poems of startling energy and elegance make up a book of questions that asks one in particular: Why do the people we love leave us in the ways they do? It is a question, of course, that cannot be answered, but through gorgeously musical language and vivid imagery, Leary ensures that, while understanding may not always materialize, her grandfather does, memorialized “forever into blood-red roses.”

–Philip Elliott, Editor-in-Chief of Into the Void and author of Hunger & Hallelujahs

Susan L. Leary’s gorgeous, lyric poems have the weight of history in them, of many histories, the dark ones of family but also of country and war, of PTSD and suicide. Somehow in that darkness, Leary finds a brightness of candor and a brilliance of description. Her keen eye discovers profundities where a lesser writer might find only tragedy. In her opening poem “The Rose Mallow,” she details, “The powdery wings of a thousand / moths // falling / asleep at the stalk. The flower shriveling so as / to feel for itself, // conscious, in the last breath, / of something missed. // As if to say, / there is the muddied earth, // there is the dead / rain, // but what of my body / will I remember?” This writer misses nothing, and This Girl, Your Disciple is the kind of collection you will most certainly remember.

–Jaswinder Bolina, author of Phantom Camera