Praises

Jay Leeming has his own way of thinking which isn’t like anyone else’s. His most individual poems come from that surprising angle of vision that marks him as a real poet. His poems are winged beings that dive straight to the playful, lunatic heart of human companionship.

-- Robert Bly

These poems are a delight to read. They move effortlessly between the rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious, accounting for the multiplicity of human desire and imagination.

-- Li-Young Lee

Jay Leeming writes like an angel. Luminous, startling poems that lift and transform...once you experience them, it is quite possible you will begin, immediately, to need them. This is a very good sign.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

In poem after poem here in this, in the best sense, deconstructive collection... the poet tongues his way into pools of rhythmic and storied music, into poems that become smarter than he is, that have protected their stores against a future when the poet and you and I will hopefully submerge in primal sound again... How else except within the motions of an inspired poet's instrument can we feel part of the redemption of our so-called civilized but brutal estate? When we accompany Jay Leeming in this breakthrough book, we ourselves become poets. Such is the gift of his Miracle Atlas.

-- William Heyen

(from the forward to Miracle Atlas)

Every poem in “Dynamite on a China Plate” drenches us like the wake of a blue whale suddenly breaching from someone’s suburban lawn pool, where at first we might think the beast lost or out of place, we quickly realize it is we who are lost and that the courageous occurrence of such unlikely deep diving poems like “Supermarket Historians” is trying to find us, asking our hearts to weep out a greater water of grief and laughter big enough for us all to jump in and be beautifully lost together.

-- Martín Prechtel

(author of “The Toe Bone and the Tooth”)