Praise for What Happened Was:
What Happened Was: is the work of a poet at the height of her powers. Its architecture has a delighful variety; we have both taut, imagistic poems that, say, consider the meaning of the word “meantime” or the middling middle finger, and we also have the “What Happened Was:” series that centers female disenfranchisement with sly surprise. This is a fabulous collection, confident and compelling.
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
In Anna Leahy’s telling of “What Happened,” we are made aware of the conflicts between possibilities and chance; the yin and yang of the terrorizing, of the sublime; the “thousand splendors across . . . shadowed stretches”; that “opposites attract . . . in a flash.” You’ll be aware that you’ve been holding your breath until there are no more pages to turn.
—Lynne Thompson, author of Fretwork
In Anna Leahy’s poignant chapbook, you see the speaker unspool the connective threads of messages and meanings into lyrical diadems. Each intricate facet illuminates a potential possibility, and yet the full knowledge that once the light shines through, piercing the edges of what is woven, the gaps are reflected, shimmering on the walls as a testament to the difficulty of this knowledge. But even further, Leahy speaks to the dangers of these misunderstandings. The poems in What Happened Was: reveal the finely hewn corners, sharpened to cutting. It is there where the poems contemplate power, silence, and the need to speak on history.
—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth
Read a review of “What Happened Was:” on Harbor Review by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers.
Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz
Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections Aperture, What Happened Was:, and Constituents of Matter and of the nonfiction book Tumor. Her poems and essays have appeared at Aeon, The Atlantic, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, SWWIM, The Washington Post, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from the Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University, where she edits the international Tab Journal. See more at https://amleahy.com.