We've just confirmed Laura LeHew as a poetry contributor for the first issue of Uncanny Valley.
Laura LeHew has been crazy busy. I wish I had encountered her work earlier. She's published in about a million journals, including A capella Zoo, Gargoyle, PANK, as well as several collections/anthologies, including Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, out from Ragged Sky. Also, her chapbook Beauty, published by Tiger's Eye Press, is now in its third printing. She's done so much that her alma mater has done some serious bragging about her.
She's also an editor; Uttered Chaos seeks to expose new poets and bring their chapbooks to audiences, operating under the contention that poetry is something everyone can enjoy. So she's a woman after our own heart.
What we like about Laura's work is that it plays with language and the page without being coy or show-offy. No quiddities, no esoteric musings on the higher meaning of mundane things. In her poetry, mundane things seem to be just the object under consideration. A sister's health problem is a serious thing unto itself, and it takes center stage in a frenetic, dodgy poem you'll see in our issue. The same is true of an act of remembrance and forgetting after a father's death. The story is never all that's going on in the works, but there is no embarrassment about or shying away from the heavy weight that her subjects--family, health, love, death--carry. We appreciated their straightforwardness coupled with their precision, energy, and often humor.
Her poem at PANK really shows off one of the forms that her linguistic and formal experimentation can take. And here's a video of her reading "Snakes in a Bowl," for an example of that humor and insight into family dynamics.
Welcome aboard, Laura!
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