Joseph Lease – författare

In this “spare, evocative” collection of poems from the prize-winning author of Testify, “both hope and despair are evident amid [the] music” (Publishers Weekly). “Promise me the rich can’t sleep,” Joseph Lease begs in The Body Ghost, offering poems as light on the page as nursery rhymes, and as powerful as prayer. The title work, which is “broken up into three separate poems, underlines the common thread weaved throughout his collection, the search for a silver lining amongst hardships” (Fourteen Hills). “Electric and electrifying, spontaneous and illuminating,” these poems conjure up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the strength of all that connect us (Tablet).

With musical grace critics have likened to that of Robert Creeley, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, Joseph Lease mixes a storyteller’s rhythm with lyric beauty to create a collection filled with humor, political bite, and psychological intensity. In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”

"Promise me the rich can't sleep," Joseph Lease begs in The Body Ghost, offering poems as light on the page as nursery rhymes, and as powerful as prayer. Here, verse conjures up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the tensile strength of the filaments that connect us.