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I have a new website, check it out, here and sign up for the newsletter.

My new full-length collection, The Barbarous Century, has been acquired by Eyewear Publishing and will be published in 2018.   I’m very excited and very grateful.

If you missed the live-stream of the Transatlantic Poetry Series, you can watch it here: http://www.transatlanticpoetry.com/readings/41-mary-o’malley-and-leah-umansky/

If you are interested in tuning in to the livestream Transatlantic Poetry Reading tomorrow there is more info here: http://www.transatlanticpoetry.com/readings/41-mary-o’malley-and-leah-umansky/

The Sexton Prize

I’ve just heard that my new full-length manuscript, The Barbarous Century is a finalist for the Sexton Prize at Eyewear Publishing. I am SO honored and excited

 

Leah Umansky

An interview with “speaking of marvels” for STRAIGHT AWAY THE EMPTIED WORLD

Speaking of Marvels

“The speaker is so dissatisfied with life that she looks outside of her own society, even outside of her own planet.”

Umansky

Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016)

What are some of your favorite chapbooks?

Some of my favorite chapbooks are Susan Bruce’s Body of Water, Sarah Gerard’s BFF, any of Julie Brooks Barbour’s chapbooks, and Anne Carson’s  The Albertine Workout.

What’s your chapbook about?  

My chapbook is about the near-future. It’s steeped in feminism and sci-fi/ fantasy, but also is very much about hope. It’s a collection of poems that are about a female speaker fighting the good fight in a world long lost.

If you have written more than one chapbook, could you describe each of them in chronological order?

This is my third book of poems, and my second chapbook.  My first chapbook is the Mad Men inspiredDon Dreams and I Dreams

View original post 904 more words

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I created a “Book Notes” for Largehearted Boy for my new dystopian poetry chapbook, STRAIGHT AWAY THE EMPTIED WORLD.  Read it and listen to the playlist !

KING

Left inside the mound, I accompanied him.

 

First it was silver, then sand.

There was a shape of a great melodrama

And clue by clue, I smelled the change in the air

 

“Grace is set in stages,” he said, “I won’t burden you with the list.”

“But what we love will be forgotten, if we don’t follow discovery.”

 

This is not the start of love. It is a dream in the long line of a horse,

The wide bow of a ship, or the ribcage of the biggest heart.

 

The silver chipped away and a thrill rose in a dark-light.

The doubt then was a fat flower blooming

 

 I said, “More.  More.  MORE!”

 

Only that deafening smell of the overripe

Could wake me from that blast.  That pomp.

 

Untitled

I have been walking around with arms enflamed

My buzzing harks back to days past

Leave everything ragged

No one questions the start

Don’t Tell Them You’re Not the Center of the Universe

I am humble. I am the gold-standard of pleasing. I am monumental and un-sabotaged. My sweet defies the vinegar days and the bleached-out nights. I return to the day and weather whatever is worn.

Of all the magic tricks, of all the annoyances, of all the clutching, the wolf at my neck is obligated, not obliterated. She emerges. She falls in love. She settles on the wish that all lovers are not doomed. That all flickers are not dragging hopes.

Don’t tell them you’re not the center of the universe, because sometimes you are.  And while I am confessing,  all these rights trying not to be wrongs, all these fears holding back loves are just an ever-changing  tone. A vibration too high for our ears.

Maybe I am the center of the universe, ever-orbiting around a heart of gold.  A universe of one. Someday, I will bring you into my spin.

There needs to be a ground

To find. There needs to be a grounds

For finding a way up or out.

If there is a grounding-in

If there is a grounding out

Let it be so elaborate

That my skirt blows up

In a breeze, so still,

That you believe in magic

That you believe in the most elaborate of schemes

That the scheme of this life

Is a grounds for a plea.

So that the ground

We stand on leads to a higher landing

So that the whole of each half of my hand,

Each palm, could be held in the tightest grip

Grounding this in an earth that is still alive

With greens and reds, still alive in our

Footfalls and tears.

How many ask for this?