Love isn't always pretty, yet most of us choose to remain constant in its pursuit. These poems unwrap the mythos of romance with the clairvoyance of a writer who knows the best and worst of relationships inside and out. LeBlanc dares to honestly show us how even when the best of intentions fail, we can always find beauty if we stay true to the monsters in ourselves.

Beautiful & Full of Monsters

Literature & Fiction

LeBlanc, Courtney

Poetry

Vegetarian Alcoholic Press

This collection takes the reader on a journey through the injustices women face - in their careers, their daily lives, in the way they walk to their cars late at night; to smashing the patriarchy and claiming their rights over their bodies and their ideas; to a love better left remembered; to eventually finding a balance with a love that stands up and fights beside the poet.\nCourtney LeBlanc's Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart understands that the body "is a war / zone," especially, the female body, which LeBlanc explores through the lens of fairy tales, the story of Eve, her own journey through girlhood, womanhood, destruction, rebirth, and self-discovery. Each word in each poem is as necessary and life-giving as a heartbeat.\nShaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Finalist for the Oregon Book Award\nIn her latest collection, Courtney LeBlanc bravely and fiercely examines the burdens women carry, the societal pressures, the cultural expectations: "the heavy world / digging into our shoulders and slumping our backs." In many of her poems, she takes back agency - that others tried to take away - and never lets us forget the pluck that endures: "ready to bite" and "guns ablaze" and "I'm read / to burn" and "This body / is a weapon." This collection is one that never flinches from hard truths, always insist on strength by revealing vulnerability, and even in its exploration of our human darkness, offers flames of hope.\nShuly Xóchitl Cawood, author of Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning\nExquisite Bloody, Beating Heart traces the path from snake to survival to highlight the complex and often conflicted experiences of womanhood. LeBlanc's voice, both skillfully intimate and starkly blunt, speaks in blood, beauty and burden to show the many hungers and rips in the framework of femininity. With a close examination of the body, from vibrators to "belly gowls," this collection asks us to consider the dichotomy of punishment and pleasure. "I did not have a map to the body" LeBlanc writes and allows this collection to be its own cartography, a new country of strength where every woman can [grow] the fruit. [Be] the vine and the rain and the light. [Be] the dirt." This book is an anthem of urging and unlearning, reminding women to "be the key to her own opening, her becoming."\nKelly Grace Thomas, author of Boat Burned

Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart

Riot in Your Throat

Her Whole Bright Life is a collection of poems that weave together the trauma and exhaustion of a life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father. Love and hunger intertwine and become inseparable as the poet grapples to find, and listen, to both. With a distinct and feminist voice, this collection delves into a life now lived without a beloved parent, while trying to survive a pandemic and battling demons that have lived inside her for most of her life. With both fierceness and tenderness, we see a woman trying to find her place within her own body and within an ever-changing world. This collection of poems is both an elegy and an anthem – praising both those who’ve been lost and those who remain.

Her Whole Bright Life

Self-Help

Relationships

Write Bloody Publishing

This collection of poems focuses on violence, mostly toward women both from external forces - abusive partners, society - and internal forces - the violence women do to ourselves to fit the roles society has insisted upon. &nbsp; "These poems - vulnerable, resilient, graceful - are a testament to the power of poetry. We are given violence here, yes, but more importantly, perhaps, we are given strength in the aftermath of violence, the resolve to make out of language a new home. Courtney's work is an act of rebuilding - the poet in the wreckage, each line another wall plastered back together, another shingle for the roof. Poem by poem, she builds this house. When she is done, we stand in it together, surviving, breathing. We don't deserve this generosity, but Courtney delivers it, each poem "a gentle reminder of how / we could break one another." Read it. Carry it each day like the weather." - Devin Kelly, author of In This Quiet Church of Night I Say Amen (CCM Press, 2017) ""I knew we would both be broken", Courtney LeBlanc writes in her new chapbook, The Violence Within. And we are broken - LeBlanc's speaker, her readers, her subjects, all of us. This stunning collection chronicles that brokenness, guides us from the cracking of plaster and glass to the shattering of bones and hearts, and it does so unflinchingly. In these poems, LeBlanc has woven a sequence that walks deep into the abyss of abuse, where every kiss is a gun about to fire, where every page in a journal is about to be torn in pieces, where every star is a catalog necessary to fight against forgetting and excusing. But what is remarkable about these poems isn't the careful details of violence (though those are remarkable). What is remarkable is how these poems change and are changed by their creation. And what is admirable is how we are changed by reading. This collection truly is a gorgeous gift." - Anthony Frame, author of Where Wind Meets Wing (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018)

The Violence Within

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

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Books by LeBlanc, Courtney

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LeBlanc, Courtney. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beautiful & Full of Monsters

Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart

Her Whole Bright Life

The Violence Within