“Poem by poem, line by line, and word by word, Every Lash sings of our complex human entanglements with places, the past and all the other creatures we meet on the road. Earthy and soulful, funny and fierce, I needed the poems. We all do.”
—Jenny Browne, Texas Poet Laureate, author Dear Stranger
“The gorgeous, wise, and capacious poems in Every Lash offer up an index of love: young love, durable, love, mother’s love, child’s love, past love, present love, love of nature, love of language, love of the living, and, inevitably, love of the dying. ‘Off kilter and compulsive, my heart,’ Leigh Anne Couch writes, enfolding us in poems as generous as a spring pasture or a handsome stranger you met when you were young in Italy. This is a book that teaches gratitude, even awe, for all the selves that life and love allow us to be and to become.”
—Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights
“The world of Every Lash is beautifully feral: thorny and volatile but not without sweetness, too. Within this wilderness, Couch is a guide whose voice and eyes you instantly trust. Her nimble lines bridge inner and outer landscapes, each poem the map of a brilliant mind at work”
—Caki Wilkinson, author of Survival Expo
“Although these startling poems are grounded in the familiar world, they constantly reach for—and touch—the mysteries underlying. Haunted by both love and death, their voice delves into fissures of mind at once recognizable and utterly strange. Playful and frequently very funny Leigh Anne Couch’s poems are also quietly fierce, tender, and brave.”
—Chase Twichell, author of Things As It Is
“Leigh Anne Couch’s poems . . . show us not only how many different people we all are, but how many different people women in particular are forced to be, as the speaker of these poems admits: “I want to tell you more but the girl inside won’t take the chain off the door.” You must read these wise and thrilling poems, and let her let you in.”
—Cate Marvin, author of Oracle
Books
- Houses Fly Away (Zone 3 Press)
- Green and Helpless (chapbook by Finishing Line Press)
- Every Lash (University of North Texas Press)—winner of 2020 Vassar Miller Prize
Selected Poems
- “If the Eye Were an Animal” and “How to be a Wolf” in Porter House Review
- “Lapse” and “Wild Pigs” in Blackbird
- “Wanting to Hold, Wanting to Fall,” “The New Moon,” and “Anniversary” in Sidereal
- “Eggtooth” in Pleiades
- “Keel” in Pank
- “I am not a man; I am dynamite” in Blackbird
- “How to Make a Wolf” in StorySouth
- “Obsolescence” in Verse Daily
- “Life is a State of Siege, a War to the Last Woman” in Nelle
- “Youth,” “Manifest Destiny,” and “Teen Hunger” in Interim
“Leigh Anne Couch’s poems push against the ineffable so fiercely they often end up in metaphor or simile, where they range widely and wisely, loosening or losing boundaries as like gives way to is and the perceiver becomes what she perceives: ‘I write field to be a field / A green drift over bones remembering’ . . . And the poetry is gloriously equal to the depth of the vision.”
—Andrew Hudgins, author of A Clown at Midnight
“Houses Fly Away, Leigh Anne Couch’s beautiful and intricately crafted first collection of poems, makes permanent through memorable language the condition of the fleeting, its sense of impermanence yet possibility for transformation. There is a rightness of tone and imagery, a world of situations and occupations, an attentiveness to the landscape and the heart. These poems astonish and delight.”
—Stuart Dischell, author of Children with Enemies