Of Salt and Song

With sharp, sometimes stinging precision, Brooke Lehmann traces the wounds of her oppressive religious upbringing, a world governed by an abusive father and a distant mother. And always alongside this world is the world of true warmth, of nature's startling beauty, of sensual love and strawberry jam. Still, what a core (chord?) of pain in this book. These poems are not for the faint of heart, but for those open enough, perceptive enough, these poems - full of "a rage, a knowing" - will remake your heart, even as they bruise it. Knowledge here comes not from an idyllic garden nor a holy book, but from a poet's life, her survival and her total uncompromising breath, finally unleashed, on the page, in the air.

-Chen Chen, author, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

Amid a childhood of tent revivals, where "slick / haired preachers" are the garden's most dangerous serpents, Of Salt and Song explores the story of Lot and destruction of Sodom: from the betraying father as fire and brimstone that could have lain the whole city to waste, to the defenseless daughter alone in the cave with that same dangerous man, to the adult self as Lot's fleeing unnamed wife. Instead of becoming "woman of your own armored body, / stone of your heavy burdens," she cultivates a looking back that liberates, a love of self and other that brings power to both poet and person. With poems that bind music and memory with a fierce insistence on not looking away, Brooke Lehmann sets herself and her readers free.

-Jessica Jacobs, author, unalone

Brooke Lehmann's debut collection is remarkable for its erotic candor, its fierce pain, and its resurgence into light and healing. When Lehmann writes that "not even swarming flies biting my calves / can disturb my peace," we know the narrator of these poems has survived the horrors of abuse. Lehmann is that rare poet who knows understatement's signal power, as in the line, "you kiss my cheek, say dinner is ready." I love this brave collection for its fierceness and its petal-like gentleness.

-Dannye Romine Powell, author, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver