Susan L. Leary
LightNews LightNews
banner
susanlleary.bsky.social
Susan L. Leary
@susanlleary.bsky.social
2.6K followers 1.6K following 1K posts
Poet | MORE FLOWERS (Trio House Press 2026) | DRESSING THE BEAR (Louise Bogan Award, Trio House Press) | A BUFFET TABLE FIT FOR QUEENS (Washburn Prize, Small Harbor Publishing) + 2 📚| Mayah 🐶 | www.susanlleary.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
susanlleary.bsky.social
Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · Aug 14
🌸COVER REVEAL🌸 for MORE FLOWERS & it’s a beauty! I’m grateful to so many: @triohousepress.org, @krisbigalk.bsky.social, @natashakane.bsky.social & to @fascicles.bsky.social, @kcbrattpfotenhauer.bsky.social, & @cynthiamhoffman.bsky.social for their kind, generous words!

Pre-order link in comments!
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
hanvanderhart.bsky.social
just listen a little. / No one cares if you understand it who understands / why we're alive

Alice Notley
POEM It doesn't matter if a poem is clear or not hard or not It's basic and ongoing creation of the universe in terms of its particles as I speak it the poem If you're reading it you hear me too the bits of sound thought word seen, without senses if you're dead All you have to do with it is nothing Everything else is such a big deal thing poetry's mere reality No proof just be here Proving's a human invention poetry is what you do with mind which is what there is just listen a little. No one cares if you understand it who understands why we're alive I haven't understood anything since ... an academic subject I was walking say near the Grands Magasins—How? you once learned you learned how to walk the man with the monkey and three dogs isn't there anymore. I go inside and buy presents Baccarat or Swarovski I understand death now. A crazed taxi driver told me he did time for protesting war in front of Galeries Lafayette is this part of the poem 1 gave up and just listened to him for which audience he was so grateful he carried my suitcase to my door in Decem ber when I had had surgery but not yet radiotherapy He was from La Réunion and it is possible, holding it together, with what are called words but again particles of communication thee particles all that's there? all that's there.
November 29, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
adrianf.bsky.social
For #smallpoemsunday a playful apocalypse (chosen, if I remember correctly, by guest editor @mitchnobis.bsky.social for a @havehashad.com call).

cc: @tomsnarsky.bsky.social
(A header made of a pile of skulls) December 7, 2022 Pac-Man Eschatology Adrian Dallas Frandle Behold, mortals! I can consume all of Long island by commanding a giant Pac-Man on the horizon with just an index finger and thumb! The End in my palm, so yummy. The sunset a runny yoke I’ll lap up. Freshest flavor, the taste of lasts. God, the sweet obliteration of imagination.
November 30, 2025 at 7:06 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
I / have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me

Mark Strand
Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonishment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings, failing to distinguish between them. I have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and forth across the lake, of peering into the dark, hoping to find an image of a self as yet unborn. Let plainness enter the eye, plainness like a table on which nothing is set, like a table that is not yet even a table.
November 30, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
catemcgowan.com
New story out today in Occulum Journal! Welcome to Christmas, Florida… on the Fourth of July.
occulum.net/2025/11/29/c...
Christmas (the Town, not the Holiday)
by Cate McGowan I hadn’t been back in twenty years. Even the air in Christmas still smelled like hickory and brake dust, like someone had been burning sweet wood near an auto body shop. I parked ou…
occulum.net
November 30, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
maureenthorson.bsky.social
“There was a time you sat in a garden alone.” A poem by Lesley Wheeler.
Prescriptions BY LESLEY WHEELER To forget how a body becomes a church, doors splintered and gasping, call on a daughter to trickle lorazepam and morphine under the apse of your blistered tongue. Ask this with stained- glass hands that flicker along the bedsheet. To leave the service, wait for the moment your children shut their eyes and lose themselves in music. Maybe it's your wedding. No, you eloped with a close-mouthed man. He's gone now. Sneak out the back, forgetting your coat. There was a time you sat in a garden alone. Return there. Resist mothering for a while or forever. Sit on the grass as if it's easy to rise when you want. The tender blades love you. A remedy of peonies feels your shine and gives it back.
November 30, 2025 at 1:55 AM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
We've received some brilliant hybrid work for @icefloepress.bsky.social's PROCESS/MARGINALIA/OTHERWORLDS call.

Note that submissions close Midnight PST, 30 Nov. So if you have a visionary piece that fits & would like us to consider it, please send by the deadline!

share.google/EMbeI2aaJwfX...
November 29, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
theburninghearth.bsky.social
I hope you will stop by TBH for my final interview of the year in honor of Native American Heritage Month, I feature Kimberly Blaeser, former WI Poet Laureate.

"Nights we lie on the ledge rock and lose ourselves in the sky..."

constancemalloy.com/2025/11/30/c...
Celebrating Native American Heritage Month with Wisconsin Poet Kimberly Blaeser
Constance and Kimberly Blaeser at the Write On, Door County “Writing the World” conference, May 2025 Hello, and welcome to The Burning Hearth! I’m so excited to share my interview…
constancemalloy.com
November 30, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
tomsnarsky.bsky.social
happy #smallpoemsunday! 💜

feel free to participate by posting small poems you wrote, +/or small poems you love by somebody else :)

here’s an excerpt from Courtney Bush’s poem “Goats” collected in The Lamb With The Talking Scroll (Blush, 2025)
Every goat story is the preface to five or six more. The radio said it’s not morning, but that’s what it is. Grass and a trampoline with dish soap and the garden hose. An intense danger underlying all things, to be painted on computer paper with edible paint. The way the world eats you and makes you forgive it. A list poem is a spell. They say show don’t tell but I’m in love with telling.
November 30, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
martin65.bsky.social
This gorgeous season-threshold poem by @violetagm.bsky.social.

"Winter loves me windowpaned,

inlaid with bare trees. Here I am, bearing
darkness: another season draped in starlings."
Seasonal Affective Disorder What does winter love more than days that contract like water corrugating into ice? More than the claustrophobic kiss of gray drop-ceilinged skies? It loves a wind howl, the shard-sharp catch of breath and then its wraith -- a ghost parade of sighs to celebrate near-death. Every year, I find myself snow-stuck heart-deep; again double-exposed, sleet-streaked, pressed against glass. Winter loves me windowpaned, inlaid with bare trees. Here I am, bearing darkness: another season draped in starlings. --Violeta Garcia Mendoza
November 30, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
djvorreyer.bsky.social
Enjoying a snowy #smallpoemsunday with this piece by @dlassell.bsky.social's Frame Inside a Frame.

@tomsnarsky.bsky.social
EDGE MARKERS -Kentucky, 2004 The llamas clump against fence wire, staring toward three deer eating nearby crabapples, as if considering what god made their bodies so similar, so elsewhere.
November 30, 2025 at 5:43 PM
susanlleary.bsky.social
Eliza Griswold 💙

“Love surprises us. / It ends.”

I can’t stop thinking about this poem!
Flood Eliza Griswold I woke to a voice within the room. perhaps. The room itself: "You're wasting this life expecting disappointment." I packed my bag in the night and peered in its leather belly to count the essentials. Nothing is essential. To the east, the flood has begun. Men call to each other on the water for the comfort of voices. Love surprises us. It ends.
November 29, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
tomsnarsky.bsky.social
Clarence Major
Why not celebrate? If nothing else, it can’t hurt to celebrate survival.
November 28, 2025 at 1:17 AM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
litbowl.bsky.social
Still remember the surprise the first time reading this. It's not that the form is "hidden"... just somehow it only registered for me with those last two incredible lines. And then I had to read it all again.

From Natasha Trethewey's book, Monument: bookshop.org/a/862/9780358118237

#poem #books
November 29, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
A long trip today just to see Monet's water lilies. Thought about how he kept painting them while the world around him kept exploding and destroying itself.
Claude Monet's Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919 (Water Lily Pond), oil on canvas
November 29, 2025 at 6:50 AM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
fakeourway.bsky.social
The world won't stop annihilating me.

Krisma Mancia from New England Review
Krisma Mancía Summer translated from the Spanish by Emma Trelles My body has a life of its own. Octopus life Life of the hole where I hide My heart has again filled with light Black butterflies escape beneath my skirt It's late. The world won't stop annihilating me. The sun wheels. The heat tires. Thirty-nine degrees outside the body. Inside, there's rain. Surprise! Surprise I declare that my son was stillborn,. I hid him in a water tank Now he's solely mine. Summer is maddening No one should know that one day I saw an angel The sky has a scar behind its cages. Bread tastes like ash. Surprise! Surprise. I smell my skeleton's ash in the bonfire. It's early. The world has sentenced me to sew up my vagina later my mouth. Nothing should come in or out. Nothing Not even the wind I am guilty because I smell of fear.
November 29, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
chenchenwrites.bsky.social
... Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

—Ross Gay
Thank You by Ross Gay If you find yourself half naked and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing, again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says you are the air of the now and gone, that says all you love will turn to dust, and will meet you there, do not raise your fist. Do not raise your small voice against it. And do not take cover. Instead, curl your toes into the grass, watch the cloud ascending from your lips. Walk through the garden’s dormant splendor. Say only, thank you. Thank you.
November 27, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
chowleen.bsky.social
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

-Adrienne Rich, What Kind of Times Are These

#everynightapoem
it's necessary to talk about trees.
What Kind of Times Are These by Adrienne Rich There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.
November 27, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
hanvanderhart.bsky.social
Art is in danger, my brother and sister and sadly, you are in danger with it.

—Dorothea Lasky

from AWE (Wave, 2007)
You might ask: what can I do? Well, here's what. Take the exit Nothingness 75 off the freeway. Give into yourself and oppress the law. Art is in danger, my brother and sister and sadly, you are in danger with it. There is a rose for dividing water. Divide the water. Deeply concern yourself with this or the effect will be circular. Take the rose and put it in your chest, then put your chest in the sun. I'm serious. Without your help, no one will be saved. There will be no water. The earth is dying as we speak. So start now. God waits for no one. Signed, The Eternal Damned
November 28, 2025 at 2:48 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
majda.bsky.social
Deep gratitude for my press and for my pressmates.
wapress.bsky.social Wandering Aengus Press @wapress.bsky.social · 2d
Our Pushcart Noms!

Barret Baumgart: The Refusal to Be Useful
L. Annette Binder: The Residents of the Second Floor
@majda.bsky.social: Ode to One Thousand
@jessicagigot.bsky.social: Territory
Amanda Hawkins: Bears Ears National Monument and Other Diminishing Lands
Daniel Meltz: Intrinsic Marimbas
Wandering Aengus & Trail to Table Press 2025 Pushcart Nominations Barret Baumgart: "The Refusal to Be Useful" L. Annette Binder: "The Residents of the Second Floor" Majda Gama: "Ode to One Thousand" Jessica Gigot: "Territory" Amanda Hawkins: "Bears Ears National Monument and Other Diminishing Lands" Daniel Meltz: "Intrinsic Marimbas"
November 28, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
postcardlit.bsky.social
Issues 2 and 3 of Postcard are back on sale! Support artists! Read poems! Help me make room in my overly crowded office! Issues are 40% off for the rest of the year! Visit PostcardLit.com to order a copy (or copies, they make great gifts!) now!
November 29, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
shopoetryjournal.bsky.social
All issues of Shō Poetry Journal are on sale for $8 until Sunday November 30! We’re including a free cover art postcard with every order.

We produce a print journal because we believe poetry hits differently when held in the hands.
Shō No. 7 held up to a reddish door in golden hour light Different-colored spines of Shō Poetry Journal issues 3 through 7 on a small dark brown bookcase Close-up of Shō bridge printer on a creamy page Shō issues 3 through 7 stacked on a small round table in front of a long wooden bookcase
November 29, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
teniemi.bsky.social
Thrilled to receive a lovely inscribed copy of @susanlleary.bsky.social’s latest book. Thanks so much, Susan!
November 29, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
This stunning poem which gives voice to the human spectrum through elements of the natural world 🤍

'Sunlight In Fog' from SCATTERED WINDS, TO THE NORTH by Carl Phillips. @fsgbooks.bsky.social

An exquisite collection which I've been immersed in lately.

#poetrycommunity #poetrycollections
'Sunlight In Fog' from SCATTERED WINDS, TO THE NORTH by Carl Phillips. @fsgbooks.bsky.social
November 28, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
mayacpopa.bsky.social
A poem from my forthcoming book in Poetry London today 🤍
November 28, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Susan L. Leary
vespertine4.bsky.social
This morning, I finished reading @susanlleary.bsky.social's Dressing the Bear on the train to work. When I looked up, sunlight was flooding the fields rushing by, and I felt completely moved. This collection is beautiful—so tender, so staggering. I highly recommend it.
November 28, 2025 at 9:08 AM