Leanna Petronella’s The Imaginary Age, winner of the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, is an unwaveringly confident debut collection and an exciting contribution to contemporary poetry. This collection does not invite us to look with the poet but insists, as Petronella addresses the female body and female relationships with rare candor and emotional resonance. This collection is remarkable in its lyrical precision as well as its unique command of narrative, which together reveal a storyteller whose power is speaking aloud what has been deemed unspeakable. Her stories are of loss, yet Petronella refuses to romanticize grief, choosing instead to highlight the many guises and contours of grief’s ugliness. Petronella’s speakers are therefore appropriate in their disgust, their suspicion of meaning, even as the poet herself tries to make meaning through language, acknowledging its limits as well as its freedoms along the way–and taking head-on the underlying fear of both the poet and the aggrieved that “this is something / I can’t turn into something else.”

Praise for The Imaginary Age: 

“Like many of the best fairy tales, Leanna Petronella’s The Imaginary Age tells the story of a daughter trying to make her way through the world with one pocket stuffed with grief and the other full of memories for her lost mother. In a distinct voice that merges surrealist imagery and playful use of poetic forms, Petronella has created a collection of completely new and deeply satisfying myths for coming of age, sexual awakening, and living joyfully, meaningfully, authentically ever after. ”

—Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue

“This is a book of transport that turns the imagination into a bathysphere, a spacecraft, a carousel. Petronella is not afraid to examine matters of sex, blood, private calamity with bold wit and verve. And while a whimsical intellect drives these poems through childhood closets and vivid menageries, the reader notes the signs of peril littering such a landscape: “unsepulchered girlish legs,” “wasps and teeth,” “pieces of beak.” Come ride this exquisite vessel of The Imaginary Age whose shadows leave a strange calligraphy on the ground.”

—Carolina Ebeid, author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

“Haunting the spheres of womb and bone and mother-longing, Leanna Petronella is so good! These are poems wet with blood and blooming with mystery, and we need them in our dry garden of a world.”

—Melissa Broder, author of Last Sext

About Leanna Petronella

Leanna Petronella’s poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, and other publications. Her fiction appears in Drunken Boat, and her nonfiction appears in Brevity.  She holds a PhD from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. She lives in Austin, Texas.