Poems by Brenda Leifso
What happens when the feminine — used, tortured, abused, neglected, extinguished —  finds its voice in anger? Brenda Leifso’s poems unflinchingly articulate the bare, post-elegiac music of negative epiphany, the place past benevolence and wishful thinking where “the heart is a chisel.†At once mythic threnody and anthem for doomed earth, Barren the Fury provides a lyric equivalent to such works of dire portent as James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia.Can there be any consolation amid such extinctions? If there is, Leifso’s uncompromising work suggests, it derives from the insightful voicing of atrocity and discernment of its mythic shape, and not in such polite delusions as “sustainable development.† – Don McKay