Attempts at Location
Katie’s chapbook Attempts at Location was a finalist for the prestigious Tupelo Press Snowbound Award and is available through Finishing Line Press.
EXCERPT:
from “What We Do With Our Time”:
Tonight in an upstairs
karaoke hall,
a man’s voice coats
the paint-chipped walls
as moon beams spray
the smoke-black brick.
He longs to be something
other than
what he is–a thin coin rattled
in the tin can of space,
in the dim orange glow
over a backroom table,
where the owners huddle like lions
over cigarettes, the low buzz
of Korean TV, and this song
their nightly payment
for whatever they hoped
America was.
REVIEWS OF ATTEMPTS AT LOCATION:
“Katie Leo’s voice resounds in places we feel we have been before. Upon reading her fine work again and again, we realize these creations of stunning language have taken us toward fresh definitions of what poetry does for the human soul.”
–Ray Gonzalez, author of Consideration of the Guitar
“Attempts at Location introduces us to a new, fierce voice in American poetry. This collection offers us tough-minded political and cultural contexts…Katie Leo has accomplished what is most difficult–to make poems that hold and explore the whole range of human feelings, and to do this in ways that show us her intellect and her restless, generous heart.”
–Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems
“Katie Leo is creating an original and beautiful new American voice, one that penetrates far below the surfaces of our realities and histories…Ranging from Iowa to Lagos to the divided Korean peninsula, Attempts at Location is a poetry for our new millennium, a terrifically impressive and welcome debut.”
–David Mura, author of After We Lost Our Way
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Photo by Levi Spaid