The Imaginary Age: Poems

Leanna Petronella's The Imaginary Age is an unwaveringly confident debut collection and an exciting contribution to contemporary poetry. This collection does not invite us but compels us to look with the poet, as Petronella addresses the female body and female relationships with rare candor and emotional resonance. This collection is remarkable in its lyrical precision as well as its unique command of narrative, which together reveal a storyteller whose power is speaking aloud what has been deemed unspeakable. Her stories are of loss, yet Petronella refuses to romanticize grief, choosing instead to highlight the many guises and contours of grief's ugliness. Petronella's speakers are therefore appropriate in their disgust, their suspicion of meaning, even as the poet herself tries to make meaning through language, acknowledging its limits as well as its freedoms along the way--and taking head-on the underlying fear of both the poet and the aggrieved that "this is something / I can't turn into something else."

Author: Leanna Petronella
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 10/01/2019
Pages: 76
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 9.00h x 8.30w x 0.20d
ISBN: 9780807171523

About the Author
Leanna Petronella is a poet and writer whose works have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, and Brevity. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri, where she was poetry editor for the Missouri Review, and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Austin.