Happy Chanukah.

Thank you to rob mclennan for his response to my book on his blog. You can read it here.

And thank you to Contemporary Verse 2 for this lovely response to my book:

“The things I heard about you is best described as self-erasure poetry. Alex Leslie’s debut poetry collection is almost the exact opposite of Graham’s Her Red Hair Rises. Instead of breaking free from a formal restraint, Leslie uses erasure to tighten 13 poems to the point of near extinction. The unpublished manuscript of this poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch award for innovative poetry and for good reason. The beauty of Leslie’s poetic process is difficult to explain, so we’ll just show you an example: “The things I heard about you – driving past I looked at bathtubs of glass light, garden intestines, spaceman. Leave him. Stringing and string up glass and you know the difference. Design in salt worn against the rising.” But even this poem is not small enough: “Smaller” Leslie writes beneath it and so it becomes. The final revision of the poem is nothing but one word: “Thumbprint.”

I’m reading in February. Here are the details:

February 18 — with Roy Miki at Simon Fraser University
Lunch Poems series
Teck Gallery at SFU Vancouver at Harbour Centre, 515 W Hastings, Vancouver
Noon. All are welcome!