Bianca

by Eugenia Leigh

Overview

“I thought I forgave you,” Eugenia Leigh tells the specter of her father in Bianca. “Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” Leigh’s gripping second collection introduces us to a woman managing marriage, motherhood, and mental illness as her childhood abuse resurfaces in the light of “this honeyed life.” Leigh strives to reconcile the disconnect between her past and her present as she confronts the inherited violence mired in the body’s history. As she “choose[s] to be tender to [her] child—a choice / [her] mangled brain makes each day,” memories arise, asking the mother in her to tend, also, to the girl she once was. Thus, we meet her manic alter ego, whose history becomes the gospel of Bianca: “We all called her Bianca. My fever, my havoc, my tilt.” These poems recover and reconsider Leigh’s girlhood and young adulthood with the added context of PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. They document the labyrinth of a woman breaking free from the cycle of abuse, moving from anger to grief, from self-doubt to self-acceptance. Bianca is ultimately the testimony of one woman’s daily recommitment to this life. To living. “I expected to die much younger than I am now,” Leigh writes, in awe of the strangeness of now, of “every quiet and colossal joy.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954245440
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	03/15/2023
Series:	Stahlecker Selections
Pages:	124
Sales rank:	546,993
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet living in New York and the author of one previous collection of poetry, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Debulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Rumpus. Poems from Bianca were awarded Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize and selected for the Best of the Net Anthology. A Kundiman fellow, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal.

Read an Excerpt

Children of Lions

The rest of us,
trembling among our mothers’

bargain trench coats, waited
for Narnia. There, we dreamed

we were the children
of lions. Heirs to our own beds. Safe

in a closet rapturous with centaurs
in symphony with naiads and fauns. And I,

pink and young, swelled like a sinless sun. And I
pretended my father—

who had struck me then shoved me in—
would find my tomb empty

and repent. No, that is the adult talking.
I was a child then. It didn’t matter

what he’d done.
I still wanted to be found.

Editorial Reviews

05/29/2023

In her piercing and fearlessly vulnerable second collection, Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows) examines how to navigate a life of motherhood and illness in the aftermath of childhood abuse, providing a testament of unparalleled honesty: “a man who’d chase his baby with a knife// makes up half my blood,” she writes in “Family Medical History.” In “Consider the Sun,” she ponders the question, “Is it better to die in the struggle or to survive it?” Such moments are bracing and real, grounding the work in a spirit of generosity and candor. Throughout, Leigh wrestles with the consequences of a history of abuse: “my hells/ would hunt me in my sleep.” And yet tenderness, or the hope of it, remains as she ponders the universe in “Reionization”: “It’s possible, then,” Leigh writes, “if we believe our astronomers and angels,/ that our abyss is temporary—.” Wrestling with what is seemingly impossible, these poems weave a powerful tale of perseverance: “Tell me,” Leigh writes, “I am not the thing/ my child will have to survive.” The result is a sensitive, insightful, and commanding portrait of motherhood and survival. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

I hope you read Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca from cover to cover, in one sitting, as I have. In these pages you will travel with a woman — brain, heart, and gut — delving into nightmare and violence to finally retrieve a life of love and motherhood, to accept that life. These poems, which are sometimes a torrent, sometimes a clear evening sky, challenge the reader to witness pain and then reward us with the poet’s relentless search for connection and beauty." —Patrick Rosal

“Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca pierces with its white hot rage and sorrow. With terrifying honesty and lyric precision, Leigh revisits the cyclonic violence her father inflicted upon her and her family and explores the dangers of mental illness when it goes unspoken, untreated, and unnamed. Bianca devastates me.” —Cathy Park Hong

“Bianca is stunning, powerful, a lesson in memory’s resistance to healing. Fiercely honest and a master of line breaks, Eugenia Leigh writes about trauma and mental illness in a way that reminds me that terror can still accompany thriving. Traversing childhood, young adulthood, marriage and new motherhood, Leigh contends with the ways constant survival can keep a person from living and loving. I am more alive and more myself after reading these poems. This is a book I didn’t know I was waiting for.” —Traci Brimhall
 

From the Publisher