Kneeling Under the Lemon Tree

"Ascension / is the work of a lifetime on one's knees," writes Michele Lesko. The women in her poems kneel for loveless sex, unrelenting housework, and prayer to a tortured god. Emotionally intense and bracingly honest, a jolt of lemon in the sea of sweetness that is much contemporary poetry.Julie Kane, the 2011-2013 Louisiana Poet Laureate, is Professor of English Emeritus at Northwestern State University and is the author of six volumes of poetry.To read the poems in Lesko's Kneeling Under the Lemon Tree, is to live by both their tart and promise. Nothing and no one is to be turned from--not the priest, not the parents, not lovers, professors, or the poet herself. The ache and yearning in the sharp lines are balanced by a sweet the poet insists upon, but still refuses (at first) in total fullness. You walk a knife's edge of exquisitely crafted line-breaks, which in their patience and balance hold the understanding of several opposing truths at once. Even silence works overtime, refuses to let you take it for granted, as it writes itself large in these poems' tight blooms of music. This collection of poems is record and mirror, and in those hustles, provides us with a powerful witness and a catalog of questions to challenge the power we wield and the power to which we're subject. This is a powerful book. It won't let you off easy, and it won't let you down.Roger Bonair-Agard, a Cave Canem fellow and National Poetry Slam champion, is the author of three volumes of poetry and the co-founder of louderARTS Project. He teaches writing at the Free Write Arts & Literacy Program in Chicago.There is such tenderness here: "Two pale breasts softly sit / atop twelve bones aligned / to protect a single heart" and "Maybe I will grow to love this sorrow." Lesko has conjured a strong, steady voice that carries her speaker from childhood to motherhood, from religion to spirituality, in intimate, vulnerable narratives that both lighten the spirit and break the heart of the reader. Here is not brokenness or resolution; what's found here is recognition and purpose. Rene Ashley is the author of six volumes of poetry, two chapbooks, and the novel, Someplace Like This. Part of Ashley's poem, "First Book of the Moon," appears in the permanent installation by artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station Terminal.