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"Needlework, as this brilliant book makes plain, has been trivialized and dismissed as mere "women's work." The poems here, however, present the powerful counterpoint that work with the needle, from the flame-stitch to embroidery, is both a skill and a foundation for female artistic expression. It is a hands-on art, passed from woman to woman through the generations. Such passage also entails the vital connections to selfhood, history, meaning, and wisdom. This is a book that syllable by syllable as if stitch by stitch, creates patterns that exceed the confines of artistic form by reclaiming form and redefining it, with a total effect that is affirming and transcendent. What a joy it is to inhabit this world in which the needle and the pen share the labors of love. After all, love is a most subversive expression. This book is proof." -Maurice Manning
About the author
Mary Leader is the author of five collections of poems. The first two won major awards in the United States, the National Poetry Series and the Iowa Poetry Prize. In the United Kingdom, her publisher is Shearsman Books. The Distaff Side is her third book at Shearsman. For many years, Leader practiced law in her native state of Oklahoma, first as an Assistant Attorney General and later as a Referee for the Oklahoma Supreme Court. She then parlayed herself into a career in academics, earning a PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and going on to teach, at Emory University, University of Memphis, then Purdue University, where she is now Professor Emerita. Subject to homesickness all along the way, Mary Leader retired from active teaching and returned to Oklahoma. Having survived oral cancer, she now reads and writes poetry full-time.
