The Feast Delayed - by Diane LeBlanc (Paperback)

About the Book

This beautiful and fraught book is born from a closely observed life, one rich in compassion for the natural and human worlds, for the blessings and violences we do to one another.

Book Synopsis

This beautiful and fraught book is born from a closely observed life, one rich in compassion for the natural and human worlds, for the blessings and violences we do to one another. Beneath the details is a yearning that we'll learn to care for each other more, that we'll see the life-giving connections that always surround us. LeBlanc is a poet whose pen can offer the quiet light of the moon to guide us.

-Todd Davis

Review Quotes

To undergo metamorphosis is to change form by natural, supernatural, or, in the case of the poems in Diane LeBlanc's The Feast Delayed, poetic means. It is to eat death on the roadside. To assemble a widow's kit with a corkscrew and a silver bowl of ash. Over and over, in strange and exacting metaphors, the poet reconsolidates grief into something cavernous and sometimes kind: "In a world sinking under the weight of a caged blue fox, / wind borrows an umbrella and returns a wet petunia." It is one thing to find poignancy in roses or moonlight. It is quite another to discover it in a mannequin, the burning of Notre Dame, an albino snake, a truck loaded with ears of corn, and the placing of a phonograph arm in a record's grooves. These poems find a way into my deepest ear, sibyl-like, offering beauty, humor, drama, and, yes, consolation.

Melissa Kwasny, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

"No one wants to be lost forever. Just long enough," Diane LeBlanc writes. The poems in The Feast Delayed crave the fabric of home and ease. They seed within the natural world that lives beside us, and in the rich and mysterious "time when / we didn't belong to each other alone." LeBlanc pinwheels her attention to the landscape, waking us with her beautiful phrases. And she focuses, too, on the gravity of grief. These poems nest in it, but also emerge to travel through the repeating reminders of light and the aviary of seasons, history, and the horizon of love.

Lauren Camp, Took House