Music, No Staves

Lederer, Katy

Potes & Poets Press

Lederer's debut poetry collection explores sex, gender, nature and romance with lyric grace and intellectual rigor. These open and inventive poems are filled with "a kinetic energy that rises out of erotic desire"—D. A. Powell.

Winter Sex

Literature & Fiction

United States

Wave Books

Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers

“The intricacies of family and the complexities of the games they play mingle wonderfully here in a memoir quite unlike any other.”—George Plimpton, author of Truman Capote Katy Lederer grew up on the bucolic campus of an exclusive East Coast boarding school where her father taught English, her mother retreated into crosswords and scotch, and her much older siblings played “grown-up” games like gin rummy and chess. But Katy faced much more than the typical trials of childhood. Within the confines of the Lederer household an unlikely transformation was brewing, one that would turn this darkly intellectual and game-happy group into a family of professional gamblers. Poker Face is Katy Lederer’s perceptive account of her family’s lively history. From the long kitchen table where her mother played what seemed an endless game of solitaire, to the seedy New York bars where her brother first learned to play poker, to the glamorous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where her sister and brother wager hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the tables, Lederer takes us on a tragicomic journey through a world where intelligence and deceit are used equally as currency. Not since Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has a writer cast such a witty and astringently analytic eye on the demands of growing up. An unflinching exploration of trust and betrayal, competition, suspicion, and unconventional familial love, Poker Face is a testament to the human spirit’s inventiveness when faced with unusually difficult odds.

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

Broadway Books

In The Heaven-Sent Leaf, Katy Lederer draws on her experience as both acclaimed younger poet and "brainworker" at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan to produce an uncannily prescient work of high lyric. Though on its surface The Heaven-Sent Leaf addresses that most taboo of subjects—money—what it ultimately confronts is what it means to be, as Wallace Stevens put it, "finally human." Working in the tradition of the flaneur, Lederer charts her speakers' interior landscapes according to the city's highly monetized geography, viewing life in the big city through the lens of expenditure—not just of money, but of all that money signifies. In poems that are both heartfelt and ruthlessly critical of our current financial milieu, in which the fates of individuals are packaged, priced out, and then bundled for sale on the open market, Lederer proves Robert Graves's famous observation wrong: though there may be no money in poetry, there is indeed poetry in money.
"Sparkling and strange, acrobatic but never evasive, clear-eyed about its own emotional life even as it takes semantics for a tumble, Katy Lederer's book-length sequence of not-quite-sonnets measures up to its contemporaries as a chronicle of love in and out of a life, in dramatis personae and in the poet's own soul: it excels all those contemporaries, and swerves away from almost all its precedents, in following at once the love and the money."—Stephen Burt
"These lyrically crisp poems chronicle the poet (gendered female) as 'brainworker' in contemporary New York. Where is prayer? Where nature? Where love? They are not to be found on the dizzying streetscape as seen from the top of an office building, but in the head and the heart of the poet buffeted by money-drenched dreams. 'I hate to be alone' Lederer writes, in the perfect 'Parable of Times Square.' But in this poem, and indeed this book, the remedy to the cold solitude of cash-getting is not other people but poetry."—Jennifer Moxley
Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection Winter Sex (Wave Books, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown Publishers, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003 and Esquire named one of its eight Best Books of the Year in 2003.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf (American Poets Continuum)

History & Criticism

BOA Editions, Ltd.

In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is "the self"? What is "the other"? And how to reproduce "one's self"? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body--or poem--malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body--or poem--attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral "we," the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world. In a post-Roe landscape, the poems complicate and ultimately refashion our pre-conceived notions of the self--and of life. Radical, uncanny, and stunningly original, The Engineers takes us on a journey to a place we've never been, but that is hauntingly familiar.

The Engineers

Poetry

Saturnalia Books

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

Books by Lederer, Katy