physics of weight: collected poems, by Maureen O'Leary

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In physics of weight: collected poems, Maureen O’Leary claims connections to the natural world, folklore, and domestic life in her explorations of motherhood, religion, romantic love, and the feminine Divine. In these poems, mothers delight in their fierce and dangerous daughters. Mythological women unapologetically claim their own destructive strength. Lovers consume one another in tectonic passions. Some poems mourn the transitions of the heart over time, while others rejoice in the intensity of feelings that are a long love’s result. Tame suburban landscapes remember their wilder Pleistocene pasts, while marshlands teeming with wildlife evoke visceral reminders that death is an imminent constant.

There is an understanding in physics of weight: collected poems of the wildness present in the human heart; a wildness perhaps best met by the ancient world, both in nature and in old stories. The poems in this collection are as personal as they are political, breaking sex and rage into visceral snapshots of feminine experience. The collection closely observes details of nature and the body, celebrating with vicious delight each poem’s subversive claims to power.

Maureen O’Leary lives in California. Her poetry, short stories, and essays appear in Bourbon Penn, The Esopus Reader, Reckon Review, Occulum Journal, Flame Tree Press' Alternate History, Penumbric Speculative Fiction, Sundog Literary, Sycamore Review, Nightmare, Sequestrum, Roi Faineant Press, Barren Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Ellipsis Zine, Chthonic Matter, and Sierra Nevada Review. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a graduate of Ashland MFA.