Taking its title from Marguerite Porete’s fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber’s stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: “Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century.”

“Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung as we discover ‘The demonic finalist / Of material culture / Is love / There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman.’ There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform ‘The wounded chance / To think in public.’ This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away.”
—Peter Gizzi