What does it mean to live in a country at war within itself-politically, spiritually, psychologically? Where does this sickness originate? In poems both personal and sweeping in scope, Umansky opens the door to all the possible answers, pointing outward but also to the twists and turns of our collective psyche. Read this book if you are brave, if you plan to vote in 2024, if our future frightens you, if you love this world we live in.
According to Publisher's Weekly, "The striking latest from Umansky blends rage and desire with the perseverance required to endure American corruption and sexism. Stamina, gratitude, and catharsis serve as pivotal motifs alongside themes of balance (healthy anger vs. inner peace; self-preservation vs. risk taking; doubt vs. certainty). Umansky remains steadfast in her conviction that tyranny cannot withstand collective resistance: 'What perches, what roots, what winds and cracks/ What tenses and dwells, what ails us, and what hurtles us down// Into the whistling air of despair, all will not stop us.' Accessible and urgent, Umansky's poems are a conduit for readers to harness their anxieties and channel them into fortitude."
Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss says: "Umansky's Of Tyrant walks the wide-lined, recitative path of Walt Whitman, but rather than echoing Whitman's swaggering American optimism, Umansky unfolds the litany of 21st century American tyranny. 'you thief / you liar / you sheep / you hedge of darkness, ' she addresses the tyrant. 'This is not a choir. / I will not sing, ' she writes, and what she does instead is spin, spit, perform, and improvise. Umansky writes poems that take up space, that self-reflect, that sling gargantuan words like cruelty, fear, virtue, desire, and love. To live under tyranny begs for big gestures, and she provides. In the process, Umansky's book embodies and ritualizes the epic defiance required to survive this epic period of social and spiritual trauma."
Hala Alyan, author of Hijra and The Twenty-Ninth Year, adds, " Umansky says in the opening titular poem Of Tyrant, and goes on to weave a beautiful reflection of tyrants, past and present, political and domestic, interior and external. In a collection rich with symbolism, inventive form, and meditative verses, Umansky delves deep into what it means to be subjugated-and what it means to resist. Vulnerability is what centers these unflinching, evocative poems: in steadiness, in tenderness, and, yes, even in hope."
And Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic, concludes: " In this lyric examination of fury and tenderness of self in the world, Leah Umansky asks how it is that we go on living in this, 'our riddle, ' our crisis: 'in the city of anarchy, in the veil, ' when all else fails and the proverbial-and not so proverbial-tyrant of each moment takes all the airspace. When 'courage is vulnerability, ' and when 'everyone else in the room' seems to be 'humbling their anger, and carelessly flipping off the quiet, ' Umansky speaks up. Even when 'we are all of this now, of this tyrant, ' she speaks up, even when she looks at us, at herself amongst us, and admits how this mythical but all-too-real 'tyrant sees himself when he sees you'-Umansky still speaks up. Why, I asked myself, as I turned the pages-and then saw that in this, the act of speaking, the poet gives music to the emotional intelligence of balancing our moment in the phrasing, in the language we share still, despite it all: 'in the heel of this butchering.' Beautiful, urgent, memorable, passionate work."
