{"product_id":"loving-leah-neil-creighton-9781950462896","title":"Loving Leah","description":"Neil Creighton's fine collection, \u003ci\u003eLoving Leah, \u003c\/i\u003ewith its echoes of \u003ci\u003eLear \u003c\/i\u003eand white-hot emotional center, is a symphony in a wounded key. Leah's daughter Cordelia confronts her mother's death and betrayal as she struggles back, through memory and nature's healing power, to the deep love that informed her childhood world. Creighton masterfully captures the sorrow of watching a beloved parent shrink away under the baleful influence of selfish daughters and he renders Leah's death scene with great power. You will not come away from this work unmoved, and you will be awed by the sense of hard-earned regeneration.\u003cp\u003eSteve Klepetar, author of fourteen poetry collections, including \u003ci\u003eThe Li Bo Poems\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMy Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf \u003ci\u003eLoving Leah \u003c\/i\u003eputs you in mind of \u003ci\u003eKing Lear, \u003c\/i\u003eit's quite intentional. Finding forgiveness within ourselves has never been easy. The hurt, the heavy heart, the torn-fabric of lives once intimately connected--all we believed ourselves to be must be faced and measured. This remarkable sequence of poems takes the reader down the entire rock-strewn and sometimes unnerving path. In the chapbook's concluding poem, \"Tapestry,\" Creighton comes to the final letting go, which might, at last, allow for loving Leah again. You'll be moved, and changed, as much by Creighton's journey, as the arrival.\u003ci\u003eAlan Walowitz, author of\u003ci\u003e Exactly Like Love\u003c\/i\u003e and The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNeil Creighton's gifts for incarnating feeling in memorable language, for sharp observation and clear-eyed honesty, are on glorious display in \u003ci\u003eLoving Leah, \u003c\/i\u003e a cycle of poems at once intimately personal and lamentably universal. Here Lear is Leah, an aging mother fading into fear and institutional care. The poet fills the role of Cordelia, loving, perplexed, unjustly excluded, forgiving. The story behind these poems is characterized by powerful emotional restraint, like a coiled spring. Moving back and forth over time, \u003ci\u003eLoving Leah \u003c\/i\u003ebecomes a miniature saga with the poems carefully disposed into an arc of loss, mourning, resentment, dismay, grief, secrecy, guilt, acceptance. The residue is love. \u003ci\u003eRobert Wexelblatt, whose works include\u003ci\u003e Hsi-wei Tales \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eGirl Asleep and Other Poems\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Neil Creighton\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1950462897\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781950462896\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Kelsay Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/22\/2020\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 52\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.20lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.12d\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Neil Creighton","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48440184373503,"sku":"9781950462896","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_94385e3b-57aa-4bf4-a210-5f816cf06a6f.jpg?v=1777180742","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/loving-leah-neil-creighton-9781950462896","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}