We and She, You and Then, You Again by Leah Tieger

Leah Tieger examines the human condition with a stark elegance and passion of language that allows us to inhabit the ragged husks of bodies—of seeds—and gives us hope even in our emptiness. Like a gentle farmer, she removes our desiccated husks and listens as we long for more than blankets, for shelter from the sun. She writes the necessary poems of minutia, of lovers forcing approximate passions, of unraveling sweaters hanging in silent closets. She watches the waiting parts in us and reveals them, allowing the small spaces of our lives to shine through, into insightful—and honest—existence.

–Josh Gaines

In We and She, You and Then, You Again, Leah Tieger traces a tangled root-like network of intimacies and distances in which the relationship between self and other continually transforms. The triangulation of passion here results in a stunning and often surreal reimagining of the lover figure. Faces become maps, doors, latches, unbuilt fences, and perennial blooms—contingent thresholds for exile or entry. In this shifting corporeal landscape, decay and regrowth work in tandem to cultivate a rich and complicated understanding of desire.

–Rochelle Hurt

Leah Tieger’s poetry is a deeply interior one, which is another way of saying that the poems collected in We and She, You and Then, You Again risk much for the sake of unmasking. While her imagery—stamens and pistils; eggshells that “break like lace”; even “the insides / of another person’s shoulder”—most often connotes vulnerability and its capacity to simultaneously tempt and thwart understanding, Tieger is clearly enchanted by forces that ache for confluence as much as they duel over ambiguity. Reading these poems is an act of profound opening; prepare to be unfastened, unraveled and, most generously of all, unburdened.

–Joe Milazzo