Customer Reviews

The Halo Rule

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As a fiction writer, I love to read poetry, and often find it highly inspirational. But I also find at times that the contemporary poetry scene seems too polarized for my taste; I find poets who are either so wildly experimental that I am unable to derive meaning from their work, or those who are far too mundane, with no arresting insights or intriguing language.

What I love about the poems in Teresa Leo's The Halo Rule is that they display the best of both poetry worlds. Leo's poems are steeped in arresting images, classical myth and intellectual wordplay, but they also rely heavily on sports metaphors and other elements of pop culture. What really draws me in as a reader, though, is that these poems tell stories about love and loss -- raw, truthful stories, the kind of midnight confessions that read as miraculously courageous in the harsh light of day. The "I" of her poems reminds me of some of the female narrators in Mary Gaitskill's short stories -- passionate women willing to risk their reputations, sanity, perhaps even life itself for the kind of love they believe is possible. No one in these poems is spared Ms. Leo's unflinching eye, and her narrators are portrayed with their own culpability, even in the face of partners who -- quite literally in several of the poems -- embody Narcissus.

The maturity and depth of this work are such that it's hard to believe this is a debut collection. Let's hope there are many more volumes to come from Ms. Leo.