In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions.
SHARA LESSLEY is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert's Wife. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, her awards include an NEA, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, and a "Discovery"/The Nation prize, among others. With Bruce Snider, she co-edited The Poem's Country: Place & Poetic Practice. She currently lives in Oxford, England.