The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
Teresa Leo
Literature
2002 Grantee
Born 1963
Reading the work of poet Teresa Leo, one imagines how useful it might be to plot the historical trajectory of the love poem as a form. In some ways, love poetry itself seems like a generations-long enactment of the phases of a relationship. We could trace its arc from ancient declaration of naïve desire to full-throated, Baroque appreciations to its contemporary stage, declaring disillusionment as a phase in the evolution (and decline) of love. At each of these moments, we count on love poems to articulate the permutations of our feelings, even those of which we are aware but to which we cannot fix words. These territories have always existed, but they have remained unnamed. Why? Poet Teresa Leo writes of the feelings – emotional and sensory – that are the darker side of love, or more specifically, what happens to a person when longing and desire are thwarted and how that affects her over the long haul. In regard to her poems, Leo quotes Louise Gluck: “All my life I have worshipped the wrong gods” and goes on to note that her own work “explore[s] a similar revelation, what happens when one is drawn, for whatever reason to the wrong partner. They chronicle relationships that move from agency to desire to hesitation and loss.” Few options other than desire, hesitation and loss appear open to the narrators in her poems, who hale from coal country, hang out in cemeteries, and explore doomed affections. Violence is not far below the surface of any interaction in these poems, where we contemplate “the lovetaps and suckerpunch of morning” and nearly every communication seems strained to snapping, as when another narrator receives an inscribed book of poetry and dismisses its “counterfeit slogans that hide desire.” Leo’s poems have the ring of familiarity that comes with reading about mistakes one has made (less dramatically? more tragically?) in another’s words. Through this, she brings us to the furthest borders of the known map of love – loss.
Leo received her B.A. from Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pa., her M.A. from Temple University in Philadelphia, and a Certificate in Hebrew Studies from Haifa University in Israel. She also attended the Study Abroad program at the University of London, England. Her first chapbook, Obscene Rhetoric, was published in 2002 by Archangel Press. Her work as been in numerous publications including Xconnect, New Orleans Review, Clackamas Literary Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The American Poetry Review Philly Edition, and the Painted Bride Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and was a fellowship finalist for the Heekin Group Foundation. Leo was editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly from 1990-1993 and is currently a contributing editor to the American Poetry Review.
For more information about this artist:
www.teresaleo.com