About Leah Umansky
Leah Umansky is also the author of The Barbarous Century and Domestic Uncertainties, and two chapbooks, Straight Away the Emptied World and Don Dreams and I Dream. She has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, USA Today, POETRY, and American Poetry Review.
Praise for Of Tyrant
“I can’t reiterate this enough: / the past / isn’t dead,” Leah Umansky says in the opening titular poem Of Tyrant, and goes on to weave a beautiful reflection of tyrants, past and present, political and domestic, interior and external. In a collection rich with symbolism, inventive form, and meditative verses, Umansky delves deep into what it means to be subjugated—and what it means to resist. Vulnerability is what centers these unflinching, evocative poems: in steadiness, in tenderness, and, yes, even in hope. —Hala Alyan, author of Hijra and The Twenty-Ninth Year
In this lyric examination of fury and tenderness of self in the world, Leah Umansky asks how it is that we go on living in this, “our riddle,” our crisis: “in the city of anarchy, in the veil,” when all else fails and the proverbial—and not so proverbial—tyrant of each moment takes all the airspace. When “courage is vulnerability,” and when “everyone else in the room seems to be “thumbing their anger, and carelessly flipping off the quiet,” Umansky speaks up. Even when “we are all of this now, of this tyrant,” she speaks up, even when she looks at us, at herself amongst us, and admits how this mythical but all-too-real “tyrant sees himself when he sees you”—Umansky still speaks up. Why, I asked myself, as I turned the pages—and then saw that in this, the act of speaking, the poet gives music to the emotional intelligence of balancing our moment in the phrasing, in the language we share still, despite it all: “in the heel of this butchering.” Beautiful, urgent, memorable, passionate work. —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic
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