Lea Graham is a writer, editor, critic and translator who lives in Hyde Park, New York. She is the author of two poetry collections, From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), a fine press book and three chapbooks. Recently, she edited the anthology of critical essays: From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania (MadHat Press, 2022).
PRAISE:
Lea Graham circumnavigates the world in this book. “We burned maps,” she says, but who needs them when immersed in this wanderlust, moving from Romania to London to Tapachula to Poland or is it Ravenna? Dreams fold into nightmares into life, and there are some things that we can’t get away from, like “Hotel California” in Ecuador, Galway, Bulgaria, and, of course, “the self the self the self.” Graham asks, “Where was I then?” but she might as well have been asking, “Who was I then?” as the myriad selves search for the woman who is alive in the moment, in love with a man, with words, with the brutal and beautiful world. It is a mesmerizing journey.
–Barbara Hamby, Holoholo (Pitt Poetry Series, 2021)
Who isn’t torn between the Rilkean drive to change our lives and the people, the food, the places that tie us to the past? These poems dwell in the arc of the swing at the edge of the world; they fling us out into distant locales, the unknown, the possible, only to pull us back: the home state, memory, the self, at once nostalgic and fully aware that living resists nostalgia.
–Brian Clements, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon, 2017)
Perched on the edge of “no place to go,” Lea Graham’s travel poems are an itinerary of incidental journeys into hard past and over meals shared with “these unknown familiar people.” In song and focus, these poems are balanced on the cusp—the turn for home, but singing some elsewhere where we want to remain.
–Garin Cycholl, prairie)d, (BlazeVox, 2024)
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