Bloom in Reverse

by Teresa Leo

Overview

Bloom in Reverse chronicles the aftermath of a friend's suicide and the end of a turbulent relationship, working through devastation and loss while on a search for solace that spans from local bars to online dating and beyond to ultimately find true connection and sustaining love. Things move backwards, from death to life, like a reverse time-lapse video of a dead flower morphing from brittle, scorched entity to floral glory to nacsent bud. The poems seek to find those places where the natural world connects to and informs experiences at the core of human relationships, and at times call upon principles and theories from physics and mathematics to describe the complexities of love and loss. It's a book where grief, melancholy, heartbreak, and disillusionment intersect with urban romanticism, hope, possibility, and love. Bloom is all of it, the terrible and the beautiful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822962977
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/27/2014
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Teresa Leo is the author of the poetry collection The Halo Rule, which won the Elixir Press Editors’ Prize. She is the recipient of a Pew fellowship, a Leeway Foundation grant, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships, and the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She serves on the board of Musehouse, a center for the literary arts in Philadelphia, and works at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

I No

Confession 3

The Fifth Vital Sign 4

Suicide Is a Mind Stripping Petals off Flowers 5

"Eating Is an Act of Optimism" 6

She Said: It's Not That Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things 8

Memory Is a Kind of Broken Promise 9

Bronze 11

Poem for a Troubled Room 13

Fly Haiku 16

Virginia Farm Haunting 17

Metempsychosis 19

I Have Drinks with My Dead Friend's Ex-Boyfriend 21

After Twelve Months, Someone Tells Me It's Time to Join the Living 23

II Wolves in Shells

Into the Salvage Yard 27

Home Is a Four-Letter Word 29

Golden Ratio 31

Mausoleum of the Unfixable 32

Split Screen 37

Constant 38

Your Rose Bush 40

Last Call Sestina 41

Transemotional 43

Daylilies 45

III Hidden Wings

Miniature 49

Chaos Theory 51

My Friend Asks What I've Been Doing Lately, and by This She Means Men 54

Poem Ending with Six Words from a Women's Room Stall 55

Mechanical Reproduction 57

Online Dating 59

Earth, Hair, Fire, Water 61

New York City 63

The Heart Has the Capacity to Break and Reset a Million Times 65

IV Passenger

Elegy, Two Years Later 69

The Exactness of Birds 71

Ex as CSI Episode 73

Nine Man 74

And Then You 75

The Last Good Man 77

Hooke's Law 79

Force 80

Love as the Circle-to-Land Approach 82

Horseshoe Crabs 84

Advice for a Dying Fern 88

Acknowledgments 91

Editorial Reviews

In language both fierce and lovely . . . Leo transforms the suicide of a friend and the end of a relationship into something elegiac and moving. Using a sort of reverse chronology, Leo (The Halo Rule) writes poems that begin in loss and death and finish in revival and renewal . . . This is a deeply meaningful book that has something for all readers.”
—Library Journal
 

“In the aftermath of a friend’s suicide, Teresa Leo’s speaker mourns, while attempting, out of forced necessity, to find life within death. The poems move like children led by an unknown hand through a dark hallway—trusting, yet questioning. In ‘Bloom in Reverse,’ Leo reveals that healing comes from the world pulling forward, matched with our ability to follow, to receive a hand, regardless of our understanding.”

—Coal Hill Review

"From the dedication page, Teresa Leo's 'Bloom in Reverse' props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo's friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we're at all like Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the Sarahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten. . . .[This collection] brings old hurts to the surface, no matter how long you've buried the memories of your own grief, but it reminds us that memory, in the end, is all we have. You can't bring them back, but you can choose to remember."
—Cleaver Magazine

“Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse remembers a friend lost too soon, attempts to ‘disremember’ a callous lover, and emerges beautiful and wise, with unexpected, true connection. Couplets, haiku, fragments, and a sestina shape the elegiac fury and grief surrounding loss and obsession, each deepening and sometimes reversing memory. These poems serve as an honest homage to female camaraderie, as well as the sly and unpredictable nature of romantic love. Leo’s voice is honest and mesmerizing, both social—Tilt-A-Whirl and Skee-Ball and online dating—and inward—trapped inside a house for a month with only a wretched fly. She is a passionate and profoundly lyrical storyteller.”
—Denise Duhamel


“Clarity of feeling and insight still fight the battle for ‘hipness’ in American poetry, but Teresa Leo makes a large cut into the cold caverns of conceptualism by chronicling a friend’s suicide in a way that feels breathless and moving. Such amplitude and precision masterfully locate love and grief, making Bloom in Reverse a new frontier for being in the world and surviving.”
—Major Jackson


“The nobility of Teresa Leo’s poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark—rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don’t win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling.”
—Tony Hoagland


“Following the jagged emotional trajectory of the aftermath of a friend’s suicide and the dissolution of a difficult romantic relationship, the poems confront devastation and push past it. . . . It is, however, recurring images from the plant world that provide Leo a metaphoric path to recovery.”
—Bucknell Magazine


“In poems that are exquisitely crafted and deftly arranged, the book’s four sections journey through the stages of grief, tracing a narrative art that opens in death and ends with ‘the living ready to burst / through the dead.’”
—Painted Bride Quarterly

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2014
In language both fierce and lovely (She…knew the names of beautiful things/ to describe the trauma of such a room"), Leo transforms the suicide of a friend and the end of a relationship into something elegiac and moving. Using a sort of reverse chronology, Leo (The Halo Rule) writes poems that begin in loss and death and finish in revival and renewal: "If there are tears in things,/ then tonight everything begins and ends// in water." Perhaps the poet needed to reconstruct what was lost in order to make sense of it. And perhaps she needed to control the language and structure as a way of controlling emotion, for while sometimes lines and breaks seem scattered and fragmented, most of the poems are fashioned in couplets or tercets. And perhaps Leo needed to bring light into the lines, to allow the poet and poem a place to breathe once more: "If I could only call up her image/ when I wanted I would.// But she comes and goes/ as she pleases, and won't stop// until she is everything/ that ever came and left at once—." VERDICT This is a deeply meaningful book that has something for all readers. [See "What's Coming for National Poetry Month in April?" Prepub Alert, 11/18/13.]—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal