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Taking its name from a line in Rilke’ s second Duino Elegy, “For our own heart always exceeds us,” at its core this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient. They straddle reality lines, often stepping over into dream spaces or pushing against a linear world. But they are solidly of this world, its ground and various bodies of water, where a boy can become a field and a girl can drown in the rivers of her own body. At once intimate— “ I would know you in someone else’ s life, someone else’ s storm cellar” — and expansive— “ We rape the landscape/ we can see, start with what covers the light” — Osowski is a poet of language, of notice, and of inquiry. Rilke writes, “Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?” Exceeds Us is interested in that substance and the notion that our lives are not singular. These poems exceed the pair at their center, they exceed the one life we’re granted, and they are not bound to the laws of our earth. “ Prove how weather is not a god and I'll believe in you the rest of my life." |
"As surrealism in its origins meant not unreal but more than real, a reality augmented by the world of chance and dream, Leah Poole Osowski summons, in Exceeds Us, not a supernatural but a super natural earth: “I am trying to invoke a life with an animal instinct.” In poem after startling poem, in language both beautiful and strange, the poet enacts an uncanny metamorphosis as she crosses the boundaries between herself and that of others—a lover, cicadas, reptiles, the sea. About this precarious earth of marvels and deep loss, of illness and intimacy, she says, “I want to place all my altar stones on your cloudshadow.” I love this book, its sense of fascination and unease."
~Melissa Kwasny, Author of Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today and The Nine Senses
"In a book haunted and energized by a lover's illness and, therefore, thoughts of death, Leah Poole Osowski's Exceeds Us concerns itself with what could be said, what we might be missing, and how limited we are in our creaturely bodies built first for survival but now repurposed for understanding and art and spirit. In just her second book, she has found her method and her madness both, and has fashioned a book that looks straight at a vanishing world, enumerating its wonders in language that is quietly stunning."
~Jon Davis, author of Above the Bejeweled City and Choose Your Own America
Everything alive feels extra so in Leah Poole Osowski’s riveting second collection, Exceeds Us. Every apricot or redbud, crocus or jay, me or you pulses and shape-shifts beyond ordinary boundaries. This is the land of otherwise. We know it from dreams, close to us as our own bones, and that deeply hidden. Image to image, line to line, these poems emerge like origami—each fold a new revelation—exactly this, then, surprisingly, exactly that, until, at last, we see clearly: this is a love story, “a winged thing,” just what was needed. I found myself grateful to believe in these poems.
~Mary Ann Samyn, Author of Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance and My Life in Heaven
Love, illness, and the natural world are central to the expansive world Osowski (hover over her) crafts in this ruminative outing. Appropriately, the book takes its title from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy—“For our own heart always exceeds us”—capturing the scope of feeling Osowski mines in poems that use white space to create a visual rhythm and evoke the jaggedness of thought. The opening poem, “Temporally,” speaks to her interest in the ephemeral and mutable self: “I want to change enough times/ as to be hardly/ recognizable as mammal./ Sweet fin-legged future, with your salt skin and baleen teeth, beat me/ against the reef, force a different mode of breathing.” Aquariums, fish, and distorted views are motifs that appear elsewhere, as in the syntactically dynamic poem “Like a Gill Becomes a Scar,” which opens: “Amphibian means two lives/ they drink through their skin/ mouths closed I fill// John’s water glass past/ the top he lowers face/ sips the rise off the rim.” These memorable pages are full of richly imagined descriptions that stir and unsettle the reader.
~Publisher's Weekly
~Melissa Kwasny, Author of Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today and The Nine Senses
"In a book haunted and energized by a lover's illness and, therefore, thoughts of death, Leah Poole Osowski's Exceeds Us concerns itself with what could be said, what we might be missing, and how limited we are in our creaturely bodies built first for survival but now repurposed for understanding and art and spirit. In just her second book, she has found her method and her madness both, and has fashioned a book that looks straight at a vanishing world, enumerating its wonders in language that is quietly stunning."
~Jon Davis, author of Above the Bejeweled City and Choose Your Own America
Everything alive feels extra so in Leah Poole Osowski’s riveting second collection, Exceeds Us. Every apricot or redbud, crocus or jay, me or you pulses and shape-shifts beyond ordinary boundaries. This is the land of otherwise. We know it from dreams, close to us as our own bones, and that deeply hidden. Image to image, line to line, these poems emerge like origami—each fold a new revelation—exactly this, then, surprisingly, exactly that, until, at last, we see clearly: this is a love story, “a winged thing,” just what was needed. I found myself grateful to believe in these poems.
~Mary Ann Samyn, Author of Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance and My Life in Heaven
Love, illness, and the natural world are central to the expansive world Osowski (hover over her) crafts in this ruminative outing. Appropriately, the book takes its title from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy—“For our own heart always exceeds us”—capturing the scope of feeling Osowski mines in poems that use white space to create a visual rhythm and evoke the jaggedness of thought. The opening poem, “Temporally,” speaks to her interest in the ephemeral and mutable self: “I want to change enough times/ as to be hardly/ recognizable as mammal./ Sweet fin-legged future, with your salt skin and baleen teeth, beat me/ against the reef, force a different mode of breathing.” Aquariums, fish, and distorted views are motifs that appear elsewhere, as in the syntactically dynamic poem “Like a Gill Becomes a Scar,” which opens: “Amphibian means two lives/ they drink through their skin/ mouths closed I fill// John’s water glass past/ the top he lowers face/ sips the rise off the rim.” These memorable pages are full of richly imagined descriptions that stir and unsettle the reader.
~Publisher's Weekly
“In Leah Osowski’s exquisite debut, hover over her, the poet immerses us in geographies of unrealized adolescence, where young women are singular amidst their cacophonous backdrops, whether beside a lake, inside a Dali painting, or stretched out in a flower garden. These spaces are turned inside out for us through Osowski’s linguistic curiosity and unforgettable imagistic palate. Negative possibilities hang around every corner as well, showing us the ways in which we are also complicit in the constructions and obstructions of gender. As the speaker in ‘she as pronoun’ says, ‘she’s I and she’s you every / time you hid beneath your own arms.’ But through the evolution and renaissance of Osowski’s speaker, we find affirmation in these shared connections, transparency in the landscapes of growth and escape, and the freedom that comes from the task of unflinchingly examining our whereabouts inside of them.”
~Adrian Matejka, Author of The Big Smoke
Leah Osowski’s Hover Over Her is a poetry collection that works without a net. One of my favorite poems begins: “It’s like a lynx scratch. Like igniting ethanol soaked roots. Like being stabbed by an icicle.” An ekphrastic sequence responds to paintings by Salvador Dali, translating surreal imagery into mind-boggling waves of lyricism that soar and scatter in air. The final poem, “Gather Her,” reads like Osowski’s spiritual manifesto: “Take the her/out of smother, let oxygen back in to the blue/and leave the hurt—that’s not even her.” This is a ravishing debut from an impossibly gifted new poet.
~Michael White, Author of Travels in Vermeer
Hover Over Her is currently out of stock below. If you'd like to purchase a copy directly, please contact me via the contact page.