Heartland
by LeighAnna Schesser (Anchor & Plume, 2016)

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​LeighAnna Schesser has created in Heartland an exquisite image of place that is both concrete and abstract in its intimacy. An hour with these poems is like an hour’s nostalgic road trip through the prairies with only your favorite relatives along for the ride, where the scenery is as vivid as a Wyeth landscape and the only wind is this old car’s reedy whistle.
 
Early in this, her debut poetry collection, Schesser humbly describes herself as a clutch of words stumbling through a universe written in the language of textures.  Yet here is an artist’s eye for exquisite details with textures that pique all the senses. Here a hawk is a graphite scribble by the fence post; here the sun cracks us open like an egg; here is a struggle of songbirds in the shadows and this feeling that glides sea monster-like through the wheat fields.
 
These twenty-one poems, organized by the cycle of the seasons, are as rich as the Kansas soil from which they spring and as ephemeral as time, addressing the cycle of life, the promises of love and death, and a subtle Christianity that infuses even the coldest days with hope.