Saint Worm Poems

Hailey Leithauser — 2019

Saint Worm, Hailey Leithauser’s second poetry collection, collects—sometimes warmly, sometime wickedly—glowworm, bookworm, earthworm, and other earthly and unearthly creatures, including human beings. Leithauser’s sparklingly inimitable style mates the serious with the playful, yielding a treasury of quirkiness, inventive turns of phrase, wordplay, and expansive diction, making Saint Worm a collection unlike any other. PRAISE FOR SAINT WORM Surprise is what I treasure most in my reaction to art, and Hailey Leithauser’s Saint Worm surprises. Alternately funny and sad, creepy and comfy, disturbing and insightful, the book demands attention. Quirky as Stevie Smith and smart as Marianne Moore, what you hold in your hands is a masterpiece. &emsp;&emsp;—Spencer Reece PRAISE FOR HAILEY LEITHAUSER “Meticulously crafted . . . Leithauser has style to spare, but also substance, and yes, playful, in the best sense of the word, pleasurable and pleasure-seeking . . . This is the trick Leithauser does so well, marrying delightful, silvery rhyme to darker content.”—Los Angles Review of Books “The talent and craft exhibited here is cause for sheer glee . . . Leithauser’s agility of expression and biting sense of humor shine through . . . Here’s hoping this confident and deft collection will be the first of many from a powerful wordsmith.”—Shelf Awareness “. . . In its playfulness, its confections of wordplay . . . Delightful.”—Boston Review “A frantic argument in favor of obvious beauty, of ornament, and of elaborate jokes, as barriers against something like despair.”—Publishers Weekly “Possessed of an unnatural ability with the language, preternatural grace in form, and an extraordinary capacity to be dead serious with killer humor.”—Women’s Voice for Change “Hailey Leithauser’s intoxicating first collection, understands the physical nature of words and sounds. Her poems bounce along several registers, surprising us with their diction and resulting music . . . Swoop stands out as one of the most interesting books of this past year.”—32 Poems ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hailey Leithauser’s debut collection, Swoop, won the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature. Her poems appear in Agni, the Gettysburg Review, Poetry, the Yale Review, and numerous other periodicals, and have been selected three times for The Best American Poetry anthology. She is a recipient of the Discovery/the Nation Prize, the River Styx International Poetry Award, the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award, and two Individual Artist Grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives quite lazily at the edge of a precipitous wooded ravine a few miles north of Washington, DC, and teaches at the West Chester Poetry Conference.