In The Penultimate Suitor Mary Leader strips away comfortable layers of poetic self-protection to arrive at a position of acute emotional self-conflagration. Each poem turns upon and returns to the infuriating and glorious correlations between love and art. Learning to love, learning to make art, trying to make beauty, trying to be a beauty-all these efforts call for passionate explorations in the schools of art and love.
鈥溾 Leader is a searching writer who has her craft down cold. Her poems鈥truggle to make sense of the difficulties in living the artist's life鈥攁s well as making sense of sexual desire鈥 Leader artfully articulates one woman's struggle to unite intellect and emotion 鈥︹濃New York Times Book Review
鈥The Penultimate Suitor is terrifically fresh and engaging. This is a book that never allows the reader to catch his or her breath, one in which the speed of the thinking is matched by the urgency of the feeling. The speaker is lovelorn, grieving, bawdy, pleading, but never, never self-pitying. Mary Leader reminds us that there is much to be said for simply beautiful writing.鈥 鈥 Mark Levine
鈥淢ary Leader brings a lovely music, a nearly limitless sense of invention, a ruthless taste for games, and a fantastic imagination to her signature second book鈥攁 work of high craftsmanship, of equally high desires and longings, of twin avidities, art and love.鈥濃擡dward Hirsch
鈥淢ary Leader's Second Volume of poetry, The Penultimate Suitor winner of the 2000 澳洲幸运10开奖 Poetry Prize, is a work of stunning ambition and confidence that attempts an array of lyrical forms and manages to rally them toward her singular cause: the explication of the idea that love and art serve as impetus for one another.鈥濃擩eremy Spencer, The Memphis Flyer
