The Imaginary Age

Haunting the spheres of womb and bone and mother-longing, Leanna Petronella is so good! These are poems wet with blood and blooming with mystery, and we need them in our dry garden of a world. ~Melissa Broder, author of Last Sext

This is a book of transport that turns the imagination into a bathysphere, a spacecraft, a carousel. Petronella is not afraid to examine matters of sex, blood, private calamity with bold wit and verve. And while a whimsical intellect drives these poems through childhood closets and vivid menageries, the reader notes the signs of peril littering such a landscape: ‘unsepulchered girlish legs,’ ‘wasps and teeth,’ ‘pieces of beak.’ Come ride this exquisite vessel of The Imaginary Age whose shadows leave a strange calligraphy on the ground. ~Carolina Ebeid, author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

Like many of the best fairy tales, Leanna Petronella’s The Imaginary Age tells the story of a daughter trying to make her way through the world with one pocket stuffed with grief and the other full of memories for her lost mother. In a distinct voice that merges surrealist imagery and playful use of poetic forms, Petronella has created a collection of completely new and deeply satisfying myths for coming of age, sexual awakening, and living joyfully, meaningfully, authentically ever after. ~Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue