Welcome to Kate Hargreaves' Leak, where the relationship between language and the body lives in the bumps and bruises that in turn become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In Leak, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incomprehensible, the census requests bodily measurements, a cyclist confuses oil with her own blood. This visceral deconstruction of the body and its multiple representations tests the boundaries of body politics -- pathologically, emotionally, and lyrically.
Inside Kate Hargreaves's stunning new book, words bite and yawn and breathe the page, chipping away at the dictionary, diagnosing the alphabet. A tour de aperture, these poems will leak from your tongue into your brain, gushing pleasure: pleasure: pleasure: pleasure. —Nicole Markotić
With deliberate caprice, Kate Hargreaves executes, deranges, disentangles, fractures, accidenting language into dazzling constellations. —Rosemary Nixon
Leak is an exciting poetic debut which performs a relentless and passionate anat- omy through syntax that spills, kicks, craves, bloats, sheds, and spits. Hargreaves reminds us that, for worse and for better, parts of speech and speaker tend to gurgle beyond their notional grammars. Read it and gush. —Susan Holbrook