Liquid Like This
Published in 2008
Reviews
Testimonials
"The poems of Leslie Anne Mcilroy have always displayed her agile two-sided touch. In Liquid Like This, she intensifies this talent for seeking and seeing both sides of truth, bridging the beautiful and the profane. Like Tom Waits’ baby sister and Neruda’s granddaughter, her new gritty narratives seduce as easily as they caution; soothe as easily as they trouble. They “make a mark on [our] silence, / tell [us] something holy and born” about the poetry of desire."
Terrance Hayes
"In a city/literary neighborhood/sexual terrain recognizable as home, Mcilroy gives us an organic voice, outside academia, claiming female autonomies unimaginable to most women a couple generations ago. She does so within scrupulously and movingly crafted poems of dark beauty, lit from within by love’s painful, inescapable knowledge, “past and passing and to come.” The struggle for money — a palpable backdrop — authenticates the poems’ urban bluesiness. Smart, often wise, even dressed-to-kill wise, the mix of things that make up this book are anything but formulaic, making the life and death stakes of the everyday — the impossibility of this sort of book, this sort of woman’s life — familiar to us all."
Linda McCarriston
"Leslie Anne Mcilroy says: No matter what you say, I hear the truth. And she does. Then she speaks it back to us — double. She leads us to the shine of it, the deep, dark unspeakable of it. Liquid Like This opens the mouth of story and drops us into the wetness — there is no periphery, there is no extraneous — and here we are, surrounded by the celebrated, flawed body where the clitoris plays the main role and we’re in the world of foreskin/not foreshadow, with no before/no after: only voice, a woman in the midst of a life lived real."
Jan Beatty