The Mirror of Simple Souls, Leah Flax Barber

In her first book of poems, Leah Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell'arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject. Taking its title from Marguerite Porete's fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber's stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: "Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century." || "The Mirror of Simple Souls, a series of repeated beginnings and endings, is a form of speech act which, through a Freudian Durcharbeiten, or working through, brings about a new beginning. And, in its movement from this Freudian 'working through' to a Hegelian Aufhebung, lets us begin, again, at the beginning, at the end." --CYNTHIA CRUZ || "These spare poems evoke and then draw back into shimmer. The old adage claims that we can't step into the same river twice, but Flax Barber creates an evocative, provocative current through which each step is at once past, present, and future." --ELIZABETH ROBINSON || "Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung with history and erotic tension. There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform 'the wounded chance / to think in public.' This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away." --PETER GIZZI || "Leah Flax Barber's first book reads like a journey, a kind of anabasis, passing back through the myth and history which are its own antecedents. It manifests, in the encounter, a saturnalian world: ludic, dark and sensuous, strange and vibrant with thought. I was delighted to travel with it." --CLAIRE DeVOOGD || Poetry. Theater Studies. Philosophy. Mysticism. Feminism. Women Authors.