Winner of the 2006 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize “Found in these pages is simple profundity, desire unmitigated, the things we wish for each other, the science of absolutes so easy to understand, and so devastating: these poems put complex moments in such a straightforward context that we grasp not simply the words but the full feeling as something we have felt in some kind of similar vocabulary.” ―Alberto Ríos, Judge “In Constituents of Matter, Anna Leahy looks hard and long at the ‘solid things’ of the world and discovers that they are both reflected and refracted by time. The matter that constitutes her experience occupies a space that is ‘immense’ with ‘emptiness’ but is also ‘buoyant’ with ‘joy.’ Like the moose she looks at and who catches her looking (‘Moose, Looking’), I find that I’m contained by a ‘large life’ that’s revealed in intervals of repose and stillness.” ―Michael Collier “That which occupies space; substance; experience; subject of concern, feeling, or action; difficulty; quantity; something set down in writing; from the Latin mater, mother. What matters, ultimately, in Anna Leahy’s crafted cosmology, is that family, lovers, thinkers, and saints shine like stars through each and every one of her intelligent words.” ―Kathy Fagan

Constituents of Matter (Wick Poetry First Book)

Literature & Fiction

Leahy, Anna

Poetry

The Kent State University Press

For poet Anna Leahy and scientist Douglas R. Dechow, quintessential children of the Space Age, love for each other and love of space are inseparable. The moon landings, the shuttle program, the prospect of manned travel to Mars: each stop in humanity's journey to space has marked a step in their ongoing love affair with each other and the cosmos. Told by Anna and Doug in alternating chapters, part memoir and part homage to the unquenchable spirit of exploration, GENERATION SPACE is a charming, captivating celebration of the serendipitous power of a shared passion.

Generation Space: A Love Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Dechow, Douglas R.

Arts & Literature

Stillhouse Press

Conversing with Cancer (Language as Social Action)

With more than 40% of people eventually facing a cancer diagnosis, Conversing with Cancer is a much-needed addition to understanding and improving cancer care through strong communication among providers, patients, and caregivers. Each person whose life is affected by a cancer diagnosis--patient, healthcare provider, caregiver--has information and needs information in order to make the best decisions possible under the circumstances. After studying and writing about the topics of communication and cancer for many years separately, authors Lisa Sparks and Anna Leahy combine their expertise in this new tour de force. Here, they apply principles from the field of health communication to the cancer care experience, drawing from a wide range of scholarship to offer a comprehensive view of cancer care communication and extend existing work into new insights. Engaging chapters cover all phases of the journey through cancer, from prevention to recovery or end-of-life; analyze the roles of the variety of cultural and social identities and relationships; and explore written, verbal, non-verbal, and electronic communication. In addition, this book draws from the real-life stories of cancer patients themselves to enrich the book's unique discussions and to better understand how theory can be put into practice. Conversing with Cancer is ideal for use in health communication classes, medical and nursing programs, and formal caregiver training. In addition, it is useful for cancer patient and caregiver supports groups and for individual providers, patients, and caregivers.

Conversing with Cancer: How to Ask Questions, Find and Share Information, and Make the Best Decisions (Language as Social Action)

Politics & Social Sciences

Sparks, Lisa

Social Sciences

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. 
One in two men and one in three women will develop invasive cancer. Tumors have the power to redefine identities and change how people live with one another.
Tumor takes readers on an intellectual adventure around the attitudes that shape how humans do scientific research, treat cancer, and talk about disease, treatment, and death. With poetic verve and acuity, Anna Leahy explores why and how tumors happen, how we think and talk about them, and how we try to rid ourselves of them. 
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Tumor (Object Lessons)

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Academic

Written in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing and steeped in the memory of Anita Hill’s testimony thirty years ago, What Happened Was: explores the cumulative effect of what women have been told is not that bad. The title series of What Happened Was: includes ten poems; each uses seven repetitions of “what happened was” to tell its story. The chapbook begins with the poet’s mother, who was told by the law school dean that she could not attend classes while pregnant. Other poems elucidate the poet’s own experiences of mismatched assumptions and sexual harassment in college and in the workplace, in the context of history and in the present moment. What Happened Was: speaks up and speaks back, “still teeming with syllables left to spill.”\nFrom the Back Cover\npraise for What Happened Was:\nWhat Happened Was:is the work of a poet at the height of her powers. Its architecture has a delightful variety; we have both taut, imagistic poems that, say, consider the meaning of the word "meantime" or the middling middle finger, and we also have the "What Happened Was:" series that centers female disenfranchisement with sly surprise. This is a fabulous collection, confident and compelling. ~ Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs\nIn Anna Leahy's telling of "What Happened," we are made aware of the conflicts between possibilities and chance; the yin and yang of the terrorizing, of the sublime; the "thousand splendors across . . . shadowed stretches"; that "opposites attract . . . in a flash." You'll be aware that you've been holding your breath until there are no more pages to turn. ~ Lynne Thompson, author of Fretwork\nIn Anna Leahy's poignant chapbook, you see the speaker unspool the connective threads of messages and meanings into lyrical diadems. Each intricate facet illuminates a potential possibility, and yet the full knowledge that once the light shines through, piercing the edges of what is woven, the gaps are reflected, shimmering on the walls as a testament to the difficulty of this knowledge. But even further, Leahy speaks to the dangers of these misunderstandings. The poems in What Happened Was: reveal the finely hewn corners, sharpened to cutting. It is there where the poems contemplate power, silence, and the need to speak on history. ~ Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth

What Happened Was:

Small Harbor Publishing

As the title suggests, Aperture opens gaps through which to see and hear the lives of imagined and actual women. This collection becomes a stage on which these women perform, and the poems play with notions of staging, with how we present ourselves and how we are perceived and represented by others. The stories and voices in Aperture "bend and come back again," telling the truth slant. "Anna Leahy's generous poetic imagination encompasses women from Marie Curie to Esther Williams to Elizabeth Siddal, poet Felicia Hemans to the mothers of the characters in The Wizard of Oz, a lighthouse keeper and a plethora of saints. Leahy quotes Barthes: "in order to look at [history], we must be excluded from it." It is through the rare courage of distance, both aesthetic and psychological, that the lovely, compelling poems of Aperture afford us their unique glimpse of an all-too-often-ignored female universe of inner and outer significance." -- Annie Finch

Aperture

Shearsman Books

At the intersection of science and poetry, strange things happen. There exists such a bizarre human experience and shared understanding, that we can’t help but admire and celebrate it. It’s transcendent—the crossover of discovery and beauty. The physical solid realism and the ethereal intangible ideas. The inexplicable, the long-desired solutions, the struggle that comes in between. Exploring this intersection with 69 poems by 62 poets, this anthology is nothing if not transcendent in its own right. Each poem is written about an individual scientist, the fundamentals and atmosphere of each scientist—something humanistic that breathes life into his being, into her work, into their experiment. From microbiologist parents to role-model mentors to LGBT kinship with ostracized queerness to the women who’ve been written out of discoveries to the underdogs overlooked for Nobels, the pieces are searching and full of light, passionate and full of awe.

Spectral Lines: Poems about Scientists

Current, Alternating

Wright, Amy

Angstman, Leah

Barrett, Carol

Tolentino, Armin

Ackerman, Kathy

Morris, Wilda

McDonald, Kindra

Boon, Carl

Literary

Alternating Current

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