Testify begins with Lease’s long poem “America,” a poem that echolocates between the Dow and prayer, between CNN and what it feels like to live inside a body, between rhetoric and “the water’s skin.” Lease’s work frequently manages this complex mapping of intersections between the personal and the political, but does it with an incredible music, with a precision that allows ambivalence to live in the poems the way it does in our most intimate conversations, the way it does in our lives:

AMERICA

my scream is a brand name:

blue—for awhile—

elm trees and summer and birch trees and sky, elm trees

and summer and birch trees and sky: expensive houses,

expensive houses dying: this lack of justice I acknowledge

mine—

America, one extra summer night—he wants to (you

know) feel like a giant eyeball–

I come back to Lease’s work again and again because of what it teaches me about language and form, but mostly because of what it knows about feeling.  This is poetry that gathers in handfuls of the world and offers them up as crystalline images, smells and sounds.  This is poetry not as an idea but as an experience – evocative of a vast multiplicity of ideas:

SEND MY ROOTS RAIN

presence was broken for a while, stillness was floating in

plaid dark like a promise to the living and the dead, and the

most horrible heartburn, and the old couple in the kitchen,

lights out, lights out, waiting for sound—and the leaves roll

just like faces, and the faces blow like thieves, and we all

keep our explosions, and you taste joy in the night, and the

lost boys answer slowly, and the corpse picks up the phone,

and we all claim that we’re holy, God won’t leave our

dreams alone—

This spring I taught work from Lease’s second book, Broken World, to a class of undergraduates at NYU.  In our class discussion, the students were using their best English-class lit-crit language to describe the poem’s symbolism and meaning, until finally someone said, “it’s beautiful.”  That is, in the end, the most accurate, and perhaps the most useful, description of Lease’s work: it’s beautiful.  Read it.

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Every single thing I’ve read by Amy Bloom has gotten into my guts.  I think she is amazing.  I went through a series of break ups after each of which I re-read Love Invents Us.  Amy Bloom totally gets heartache and perseverance and the god-damned difficulty and absurdity and absolute beauty of human relationships.

As a side note, I was lucky enough to meet Amy Bloom very briefly in Provincetown one summer when she told me I had the best style of all the students at the Fine Arts Work Center.  I swear she said this.

See also: An Oral History of Lorelei Lee

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