The Hundred Grasses

“Leila Wilson’s beautiful and necessary debut occupies a ground too often thought unavailable, that rich field where Modernist precision overlaps with Romantic enthusiasm. These poems cut against the contemporary grain because they are so deeply of the actual grain—attending to seed and flower, to the germ in the furrow. This collection reminds us lucky enough to read it that to encounter beauty is also to learn, almost secretly, almost thoughtlessly, beauty’s varied lessons.”

“The Hundred Grasses attends to haunted, sprawling, interior fields with American gothic intensity, and though firmly rooted in the material, these poems ‘hold / their doors toward / distance.’ Here, landscapes are emotional states as much as they are geographic ones, and a primordial wind blows through these poems. Each stark poem is a testament to what Leila Wilson says of tree branches: ‘They are best seen / bare in their / struggle.’ Here is bare struggle, singing.”

“Like Lorine Niedecker, Leila Wilson knows intimacy with nature and humans through rhyme in its largest sense, and these companionate poems abound in patterns that ‘capture scatter’ and assert consonance and connectivity in a world of dissonance and dispersal. Formally compressed but expansive in spirit, rigorously built from precision and paradox, these brilliant poems fuse absence and presence in lines full of a feeling that has no opposite.”

“Leila Wilson’s first book of poetry is an ode to and reflection on nature—how it works on us and we on it. Motifs of erosion, germination, decay, and migration highlight omnipresent cycles and connect to their human equivalents… . Careful readers will appreciate Wilson’s concise stanzas that not only build illuminating poetry but stand on their own.”