Mark the Music

Poetry. The poems of MARK THE MUSIC are by turns serious and comic—often simultaneously—spiritual and skeptical, reflective and boisterous. Their subjects range from "the little / violence lifting their / scarred hands / in one poor truce after another" to the daily acts of inventiveness that are among the bulwarks against chaos. In form, Leffler's poems engage traditional lyric and narrative, fractured syntax, word art, and improvisational riffs. A number of poems draw on the spirit of the Bible and the shape of Talmudic commentary, while others are at play between the boundaries of paraphraseable meaning and abstraction. The heart of the book is bounded by two versions of "What I Want of It," namely Poetry.