Exceeds Us

Overview

A lyrical exploration of love, loss, and the natural world.

Exceeds Us delves into the complexities of new love against a backdrop of underlying illness, reminding us that existence is transient. These poems straddle the line between reality and dream, inviting readers to explore the landscapes of the heart and the world around us. A boy becomes a field, a girl drowns in the rivers of her own body—intimate and expansive, these poems invite notice and inquiry.

Osowski's collection exceeds the boundaries of a single life, exploring themes of connection, transformation, and the enduring power of nature. For readers who appreciate contemporary poetry, nature-inspired verse, and explorations of love and loss.

Reviews

"As surrealism in its origins meant not unreal but more than real, a reality augmented by the world of chance and dream, Leah Poole Osowski summons, in Exceeds Us, not a supernatural but a supernatural earth: 'I am trying to invoke a life with an animal instinct.' In poem after startling poem, in language both beautiful and strange, the poet enacts an uncanny metamorphosis as she crosses the boundaries between herself and that of others—a lover, cicadas, reptiles, the sea. About this precarious earth of marvels and deep loss, of illness and intimacy, she says, 'I want to place all my altar stones on your cloudshadow.' I love this book, its sense of fascination and unease." —Melissa Kwasny, Author of Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today and The Nine Senses

"In a book haunted and energized by a lover's illness and, therefore, thoughts of death, Leah Poole Osowski’s Exceeds Us concerns itself with what could be said, what we might be missing, and how limited we are in our creaturely bodies built first for survival but now repurposed for understanding and art and spirit. In just her second book, she has found her method and her madness both, and has fashioned a book that looks straight at a vanishing world, enumerating its wonders in language that is quietly stunning." —Jon Davis, author of Above the Bejeweled City and Choose Your Own America

"Everything alive feels extra so in Leah Poole Osowski’s riveting second collection, Exceeds Us. Every apricot or redbud, crocus or jay, me or you pulses and shape-shifts beyond ordinary boundaries. This is the land of otherwise. We know it from dreams, close to us as our own bones, and that deeply hidden. Image to image, line to line, these poems emerge like origami—each fold a new revelation—exactly this, then, surprisingly, exactly that, until, at last, we see clearly: this is a love story, 'a winged thing,' just what was needed. I found myself grateful to believe in these poems." —Mary Ann Samyn, Author of Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance and My Life in Heaven

Author Biography

Leah Poole Osowski received Saturnalia’s Alma Book Award and is the author of hover over her (Kent State University Press, 2016), which won the Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and was the emerging writer in residence at Penn State Altoona. She is the poetry editor of Raleigh Review and lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, the writer John McShea.