Blurbs: Imagine desire as a boscage, heady with its scents, untamed, infinite in its ability to sex and seed. This is the terrain Shira Dentz paints in her passionate Leaf Weather, a luminous canvas upon which each variation of color, each nuanced line, brings us ever closer to the garden of earthly delights. Like Emerson, Dentz pays homage to the sacred wood wherein songs are "always new, like time itself, or like love." —D. A. Powell Veering—often within a single poem, often within a single line—from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a "chapbook" in no diminutive sense of the term. In "peeling/away the sun," Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words. —Mark Levine What I admire most about Shira Dentz’s poetry is the sometimes wacky, sometimes heart-wrenching precision of her descriptions: “my bubby is a black pump,” for example, or “the sky tinfoil” or “fog / a close cousin to the spider web.” Always at work is a surprising fusion of self-deprecating humor with vulnerable, self-revealing yearning — “want to make/ suction cups out of the bluegreenyellow air” — and a revelatory insight into the quirky essences of people and things. —Jacqueline Osherow