with
Laurel Radzieski
NEW Book Coming in Fall 2025!
Leaf Manifesto
Winner of Middle Creek Publishing & Audio’s 2024 Halcyon Award for Poetry
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Read the Reviews ...
In a landscape where women become trees, communities are many-leafed and greened, and evolution is always one step away, Laurel Radzieski’s Leaf Manifesto introduces to contemporary poetry a haunting biosphere previously unimagined. Replete with “root rot” and “unification,” the poems in Leaf Manifesto are a staggering homage to the loneliness and rebirth of transition. While the speaker is preoccupied with arboreal transformation, a modern-day reader can’t help but glean from these poems a fierce resistance to U.S. fascism and transphobia. “Must I always be how I have always been?” asks Radzieski’s speaker. And, later: “I knew I was not in heaven / because none of us / had ever died.” This book gives me hope.
Remi Recchia
Employing a medley of forms, Radzieski weds fantasy and social critique to reconsider womanhood. These inquisitive and inventive poems playfully masquerade while encouraging personal transformation. Looking to trees as, at times, paradigms of wholeness and freedom, Radzieski here presents an ecopoetry in the style of mythology. These are poems in which you will find continual inspiration and delight.
Christopher Nelson
In Leaf Manifesto, Laurel Radzieski invites readers on a journey that tenderly subverts “society’s linear tendencies,” offering sharp insights rooted in deceptively simple language. Through a playful and thought-provoking question/answer, true/false format, Radzieski challenges our assumptions about identity and what it means to live freely. “Women are dangerous. / Best cross to the other side of the street / when one or several of them are near,” she writes—an inversion that typifies the book’s ability to turn the familiar inside out. Leaf Manifesto invites us to imagine transformation not as escape, but as liberation: to create a life “with a goal that [doesn’t] / stem from shame.” This graceful reimagining of self is both manifesto and meditation—a captivating exploration of what grows when we choose to root ourselves differently.
Elena Georgiou
Laurel Radzieski’s Leaf Manifesto is an engaging read. Imaginatively exploring a woman becoming a tree, the poems move readers through a tree’s growth stages from seedling to fruiting using a variety of forms such as Venn diagram, shaped poems, and true false questions. Radzieski’s Leaf Manifesto encourages readers to explore new thoughts about humans’ connections with trees. Would being a tree harm others, Radzieski wonders, and what does it feel like to photosynthesize? One poem offers “Affirmations to Add to Daily Tree Routines.” Another explores “How to Join a Fungal Network.” If you love trees, this book will help you examine them from original and unusual perspectives and help you see your relationship to trees in new and often delightful ways.
Anna Citrino
Poetry Book By Laurel Radzieski
Red Mother
Winner of the 2020 Whirling Prize in Poetry
Sometimes we all feel as if our relationships consume us. In Red Mother Laurel Radzieski weaves a love story told from the perspective of a parasite. This series of short poems explores the intimacy, desire and devotion we all experience by following the sometimes tender, often distressing relationship that emerges between a parasite and its host.
2020 WHIRLING PRIZE:
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Read the Reviews ...
In these compact folds, curls of words on page in coiled small shapes, host body becomes night sky and increasingly intimate terms flex gut songs. Germ fable churns in compositional allegory, and a Frankenstein story is rescaled and mutates on the level of cell and issue. Laurel Radzieski is a wildly original poet in this purging of confusion and charges with whom or what speaks through what we or one carries around in the cosmos inside.
Douglas A. Martin
Red Mother asks the reader to consider a meaty host’s innards as objects of desire: written from the perspective of a parasite, these short poems force us to “Imagine a blemish / or, better yet, a sore” with a kind of twisted love. Like a teeming catalog of left-justified grubs, Radzieski’s poems become progressively more objectifying, abusive, desperate for pure disembodied flesh. Where the speaker-worm begins from a place of supposed tenderness — “This is a love poem / I’ll prove it to you” — its impending demise, a growing hunger for possession, soon turns it egomaniacal: “I am securing / your humanity. … A ‘thank you’ / would be nice”; “If I was so unwanted / why did you lead me on / with your fluids?” To be human, the poems imply, is to writhe and squirm with that which eats away at you, those particular types of repulsive creatures so blind to their own being that they ask “Is this my anus / or my mouth / or something more useful?”
Kenna O’Rourke
If you're in the mood for some wackier fare, Red Mother by poet Laurel Radzieski depicts an all-consuming love affair -- between a parasite and its host. Told from the parasite's perspective, Radzieski's quirky yet sinister poems take the reader through the organism's life cycle, teetering between science and imagination. Red Mother is a dark tale of longing, achieving the perfect balance of horror and romance.
Sara-Kate Astrove
For a metaphor to work it needs to be real and Laurel Radzieski, in Red Mother, gives voice to an all too real parasite. A cross between Kafka and a horror film, these concise, concrete poems slowly burn until they overtake us through profound recognition. Dare we call her parasite love?"
Kenny Fries
Halfway through Laurel Radzieski's Red Mother she writes, "There are so many ways to tell this story, / all sickening. / So much of who we are / requires purging." With that idea in mind, there are many ways to read this inventive and complex collection of short poems that take on the life cycle of a parasite. The poems are at once scientific and fantastical but can easily be a metaphor for our own dependent relationships. Radzieski's sparse style brings a sharp cleanness to a rather messy topic.
Stephen S. Mills
goodreads
I sympathize
with your limits.
The way you digest
by churning
is endearing.
Author and Poet
Laurel Radzieski
Laurel Radzieski is a poet and writer. Her second book, Leaf Manifesto, was awarded the Halcyon Award for Poetry and will be published by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio in summer 2024. Her first book, Red Mother (NYQ Books, 2018), won the 2020 Whirling Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Rust + Moth, Atlas and Alice, Clockhouse, HOOT, Kosmos Journal, House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, Witcraft, and elsewhere, including on a street sign and roadsides in Wisconsin. She has been a writer-in-residence at Wormfarm Institute. Laurel enjoys writing poems for strangers in public places on an electric typewriter. She is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University and teaches writing workshops for youth and adults. When not writing poetry or grant writing, she can usually be found playing board games and tabletop role playing games. Laurel earned her MFA at Goddard College and her BA at Keystone College. She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Photo by Steve Johnson
Digest some of Laurel’s Work …
Sample Question
Helpful Wellness Tips for Women
Who Have Turned into Trees
Passing
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Meet The Poet
August 31, 2024
12:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Lancaster Troll Market 44
North Queen Street, 1004A
Lancaster, PA 17603
… I write poems about tacos wherever I go, but more than being about food, the poems are about relationships. They are about the feeling of being home.
Readings, Talks & Interviews
Discover what drives Laurel’s poetry and writing projects.
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trees
engaged in conversation
cups of tea
consumed while writing poetry
Contact Laurel
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