The Eaten

Praise for Leah Saint Marie

“A rich, complex, sharp collection of poetry, sometimes strange and often strangely, hauntingly beautiful. Ferocious poems that are also resonant with song-like turns and tonal surprises. The double rhythms (of violence and tenderness, of animal and human, of sexual hunger and the body’s losses) pull us in and hold us in thrall like a heartbeat.”
– Karen Connelly, author of The Lizard Cage & The Change Room

“Diamonds. That’s what the poems that inhabit Leah Saint Marie’s constellational debut are: diamonds. Small and brilliant, they radiate the ‘careful violence’ that is so often the residue of the ‘earned ache of something unfinished.’ And like diamonds, the slightest turn reveals a sudden unexpected flash: some small, yet essential, detail of ‘this nowness’ that, without the eye of an exquisite poet, would risk being lost forever as the ‘world rockets forth / in a finite trajectory.’”
– Scott Navicky, author of Humboldt & If You Give Me a Lily, I’ll Make It a Field: The Wexner Lectures

“Encounters first and last, with the tides and the seasons, the cosmos, and the inner workings of the mind and the heart, in every poem a journey and a discovery.”
– Meedo Taha, author of A Road to Damascus

“Leah Saint Marie’s voice is just as savage as it is vulnerable. Her ability to balance all the intricate complexities of family dynamics on a line of well-crafted prose left me aching.”
– Morgan Nikola-Wren, author of Magic with Skin On

“Leah Saint Marie’s kaleidoscopic collection of poetry…evokes a young Patti Smith quality in identifying the prosaic or quotidian moments in life and relates them to the Natural World and, in some cases, the incomprehensible emptiness of eternity. [S]he taps into the irry relationship between the raw essence of Nature and our own wants and insatiable needs we identify and chase after in life. By observing the Earth and its creatures, she brings out a more profound truth about our own place in the sometimes unforgiving reality of existence. She is unapologetic in her exploration of the dirty true emotions that can overwhelm and recalibrate our lives. She closes the collection with an unfiltered set of poems about
coming of age, first experiences, and the marks they leave on the soul. Her final poem, ‘Five Blackbirds,’ is a luminous finish to this lush and far-reaching tapestry of poetry.”
– Theo Salter, Writer for the Owl & Pussycat Theatre Co.