Shara Lessley, The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018)
What is #SeptWomenPoets?
Drawing inspiration from fellow poet Nicole Sealey’s #SealeyChallenge, Shara Lessley, poet and Assistant Poetry Editor at Acre Books, started the social media hashtag #SeptWomenPoets to form an international community of readers interested in the work of women poets. Readers share and discuss their favorite work on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media outlets.
What We’re Reading
In homage to the founder of #SeptWomenPoets, we’re beginning with Lessley’s The Explosive Expert’s Wife, published in 2018 as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series.
Why We Love It
Lessley’s poems are well-crafted poems of witness and range. We’re taken with the “Arab Spring” poems in the collection, including these first lines from the poem “Arab Spring [Petra]”:
The wind doesn’t choose what it moves
as it moves it: warm rain turning
dust to mud. The wind doesn’t choose
what it moves: God, penning his book
on the crow’s black belly
or these lines from “Found Poem: No Joke”:
The [McNamara brothers(1)] enter Planet Passion
to buy [Sam Melville(2)] an inflatable doll.
Behind the counter [George Metesky(3)] points
out boxes marked “Male” and “Female.”
For more of Lessley’s work, visit her author site or find her on Twitter.