Stacie Leatherman weaves lush metaphors and imagery that drifts and flakes, and is riddled with earthly abundance, colors, and dust. Her writing is sensory, and her voice and syntax trick you until you lose the difference between leaves and flesh.
I was drawn to an unknown book by an unfamiliar poet from Ohio, because of the title. Two words pressed close, which sounded so good when I said them aloud, is what piqued my interest in Stacie Leatherman’s Stranger Air.
Stacie Leatherman weaves lush metaphors and imagery that drifts and flakes, and is riddled with earthly abundance, colors, and dust. Her writing is sensory, and her voice and syntax trick you until you lose the difference between leaves and flesh. The tone of Stranger Air is soft, but interspersed with the velvet punches of her word choices.
I found myself reading and often rereading several of my favorite poems, or the entire book. I greedily clung to every gentle pulse, and that’s the magic of it. For instance, in the very first poem, “Beached”, I was most notably struck by:
The current had arrested me,
strong arms around the waist. It’s slow panic
to be the quiet, steady, struggling thing
in the water…
You get the point right away. The image is quite clear, but it’s like watching a movie in slow-motion with the sound turned off. Further on, she writes:
Head down I hauled
the stones of water as a monk might have carried his
up the steep cliff to the budding monastery,
eyes on the pinnacle, stone a blessing
on his back, as the weak, the matted, the starving do…
Leatherman illuminates the heavy urgency of drowning. It’s unhurried, as water slows everything down, like swimming through molasses, and we are strangely present in this terrifying potential of dying. The calm of this poem is eerie. The seizure is quick in actuality, but because of the element and its properties, time jumbles and thickens, and all kinds of flashes prickle through. And the reader is left to witness the shaking, and being shaken by the whole experience.
One of my absolute favorite poems from the book is “Tea Party”. I flashback to the dreams I used to have as a child. It holds a certain Alice in Wonderland or Nutcracker quality. The words are strung together, and smell of age and forgotten things:
You at last
have come. The push of the door
tastes like dusty wind. And that’s
how you find us, glass-eyed, shivering,
glancing at each other
as you release us into stranger air.
It is the very nature of deep memory, like cobwebs grazing the skin. It is profound and electric to have, as an adult, rekindled dreams and reclaimed lost treasures from one’s childhood. I have read this particular poem at least a dozen times so far, and have made a point of sharing it with my nine year-old niece.
Stranger Air also has elements of rebellion, desire, and wanderlust. Sometimes Leatherman uses colors to drive her point, the wings of an animal, or the character of delphiniums. In “Compass” she writes:
I choose my path and sway,
though not forward because of sheer red restlessness,
and a need to climb.
I love that part of the first stanza because that is exactly the color I would associate with restlessness. It’s red because it is like the blood in our veins, always running and never still, not even for a moment. In another instance she writes:
Lay your wings out like a robe. When I speak
I speak directly to you and close to your mouth,
so you cannot resist…
This is what the poem demands of the reader, or the book for that matter. Hear every word. Let me in. This is where that velvety right hook comes into play. And again, her tone and voice do not waiver; there’s no need to shout.
There’s daring in “Lap Dance”, where certain lines just grab hold, and dominate the entire poem, such as:
I won’t accept loss ever…
The willfulness is immediate. It’s simple and deliberate, and utterly perfect. “Lap Dance” has the audacity to suggest charging death a fee for your life, and I loved it.
Nothing illustrates the powerful human impulse to roam better than the line from “Land Lights” where she writes:
Couldn’t see the turn, but I wanted it.
In Stranger Air, desire is not an obnoxious thing, but an honest one. The longing to shoot off in any direction is universal. And living flesh is perfect and tragic at the same time. Leatherman deftly paints, whispers, and lulls you with deep tones laced with sweet and humid forms, but reminding you all the while to breathe slowly and breathe deep.
