Leah Umansky

“Give me those old habits, but jangle it a little this way and that”. When I read these lines of Leah Umansky’s, I thought of Emily Dickerson’s great lines, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant”, and wondered how she’d feel about this book from one of her literary daughters. I think she’d recognize the stakes and stratagems of Domestic Uncertainties in a happy instant.”

“In the same way that every text is a “marriage of words” one to another, every marriage is a collision of worlds with each other. Sometimes this makes for a beautiful new composition, and sometimes it shatters into sharp jagged pieces. In these poems, Leah Umansky addresses the latter with ferocity and wit and emotional candor, making compositions out of the pieces of a love both “strange and altered”. These “unlove” letters go in search of a wild “new bravery,” renewing our vows to romance and commitment, while wondering aloud if romance and commitment are even still possible/desirable.”


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“The language slips, shifts, recalibrates and the world, shaken, is quietly remade, again and again before our eyes in this lovely, sorrowing and finally transformative book. Leah Umansky is to be congratulated for her sensitive, nuanced, consoling and deeply honest sojourn on the page.”

“Leah Umansky’s first collection, Domestic Uncertainties, is at once delightful and disturbing, illusive and elusive. Her literary and often witty poems are like reflections in a shattered glass that mirror the fractures and disappointments in our un-crafted and witless lives. A masterful wordsmith, she addresses “what lies between the lies,” that distance between reality and imagination, between what is said and what is meant. The pleasure offered by her quirky mediations is surprising and irresistible.”