Her Whole Bright Life
(By Courtney LeBlanc)
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| Author | Courtney LeBlanc |
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Courtney LeBlanc writes the way a miner mines for gold––hacking away at the mundanities of life––each poem striking the treasure beneath the dark monotony. This book will teach its readers to always look for the poem in everything, which is to say, it will color your world, convince you of the unequivocal worth of each unpromised moment. An incredibly brave collection, this book doesn't lie. It isn't a mortician. It's real, honest in a way that will force us each to be more honest with ourselves. When you are jaded by the world, pick up this book. It will rekindle your love of poetry, of living.
~ Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me
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In Her Whole Bright Life, Courtney LeBlanc offers an incomplete list of truths: We are all of us small. Running is an escape from crying. Talking to our beloved dead is basically talking to ourselves. This book reminds us of the importance of “trying to write about joy,” even in the darkest times, and that “the other side of grief is love.” I recognize myself in these poems—in the anxiety I always feel that spiked during the pandemic. In the complicated relationship with a mother. In watching a father die. In trying to find “some heaven / I don’t believe in.” LeBlanc is the brightest and bravest poet I know.
~ Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Green
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Courtney LeBlanc's collection Her Whole Bright Life lives up to its title: it is personal, vibrant, and alive. Reckoning with personal grief for a father and societal grief and anxiety in the age of COVID, these poems fearlessly scrutinize the political meaning of personal choices, from the best choice of movie after losing a parent (Dirty Dancing, of course) to the daily struggle of disordered eating.
LeBlanc's poems pull no punches; the opening piece, "Self-Portrait," reveals the speaker's self-lacerating internal voice: "I cannot / stop / thinking my body would be better / if there were less / of it." Through lyric reflections, prose poems, and elegies, Her Whole Bright Life obsessively asks what it means to care for a body as it lives and dies: "this is what we do for death, / we feed the living." The obsessive attention to the dying body of the speaker's father sits uncomfortably close to the speaker's obsessive attention to her own body, barely recovered from an eating disorder ("When I gave up that slow march toward a hungry / death I thought I'd be normal"). The stakes are high here: poetry becomes nourishment, as in "Prompt," which lists writing prompts that culminate in an act of consumption that is nearly sacramental, a poem baked "inside a loaf of bread, your mother's recipe [...] With each bite you swallow, forgive yourself."
Through her wit, sorrow, and rage, LeBlanc creates a poetic world that tries to make sense of global anxiety and personal suffering. In these frank, sensual poems, the living and the dead share meals, allowing themselves to be consumed by each other—after all, that's what grief is.
~ Laura Passin, author of Borrowing Your Body”
