Emily Leithauser was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Western Massachusetts. She earned her MFA in poetry at Boston University and her PhD in English at Emory University, where she is a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Blackbird, Literary Imagination, and Southwest Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of the 2015 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans prize for poetry. She lives in Atlanta with her fianc�, Simon, and their two dogs. The Borrowed World is the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award.
In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser's formal mastery-her
consummate knack for writing lines and sentences as crisp and
elegant as the Edo prints to which she pays homage-entwines with
the sheer immediacy and vulnerability of the poet's voice.
Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and
familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false
resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems
themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is
made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major
talent.-Peter Campion, 2015 Able Muse Book Award judge
Emily Leithauser's first collection, The Borrowed World, is an
elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss,
familial relations-with all the devastating implosions within-and
our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of
memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a
finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring
rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning
debut.-Natasha Trethewey, 2012-2014 US Poet Laureate
If her intensely accurate perceptions of the physical world and the
beautiful forms in which she sets those perceptions were all that
Emily Leithauser gave us in these poems, they would be more than
enough to satisfy the hungriest poetry reader. But step by
perspicuous step, in poem after poem, she enlarges and encompasses,
she broadens and deepens and transmutes perception into feeling,
feeling into thought, and thought into revelation.-Vijay Seshadri,
winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Love poems, family poems, narrative poems: The Borrowed World is a
moving and memorable debut which covers a lot of ground but is
always rooted in actualities. The poems are very well-made, too,
but their equally great distinction is to be well-felt-subtle in
their account of the observing "I," and simultaneously generous and
shrewd in their understanding of others. Page by page, they create
a series of powerful cameos; taken as a whole, their larger purpose
emerges: to register what can be known and (especially) not known
about our lives as individuals, and to value what time allows us to
enjoy on earth, while admitting the brevity of our stay
here.-Andrew Motion, 1999-2009 UK Poet Laureate
I have read The Borrowed World several times, and each time I find
more in it to be delighted and touched by. Emily Leithauser's art
waits for you, and I am sure that you will be as pleased and moved
by it as I have been.-Michael Palma (from the foreword)
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