The Hundred Grasses

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Praise for The Hundred Grasses“Leila Wilson’s beautiful and necessary debut occupies a ground too often thought unavailable, that rich field where Modernist precision overlaps with Romantic enthusiasm. These poems cut against the contemporary grain because they are so deeply of the actual grain— attending to seed and flower, to the germ in the furrow. Wilson finds within the agricultural that ceaseless call back toward life’s cultivation, and so these poems enter into what they also document: human kindness in the midst of the most basic of difficulties, of being a person among people, of attending to the ‘mingled yarn’ of lives in relation. The Hundred Grasses reminds us that our greatest ethical lessons are found in our deepest aesthetic pleasures, and to encounter beauty is also to learn, almost secretly, almost thoughtlessly, beauty’s varied lessons.”—Dan Beachy-Quick“The Hundred Grasses attends to haunted, sprawling, interior fields with American gothic intensity, and though firmly rooted in the material, these poems ‘hold / their doors toward / distance.’ Here, landscapes are emotional states as much as they are geographic ones, and a primordial wind blows through these poems. The music is elemental. Each stark poem is a testament to what Wilson says of tree branches: ‘They are best seen // bare in their / struggle.’ Here is bare struggle, singing.”—Robyn Schiff“Like Lorine Niedecker, Wilson knows intimacy with nature and humans through rhyme in its largest sense, and these companionate poems abound in patterns that ‘capture scatter’ and assert consonance and connectivity in a world of dissonance and dispersal. Formally compressed but expansive in spirit, rigorously built from precision and paradox, these brilliant poems fuse absence and presence in lines full of a feeling that has no opposite.”—Brian TeareLeila Wilson’s poems have appeared in Poetry, A Public Space, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Canary, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and is a former editor of Chicago Review. The Hundred Grasses is her first book.