Leave It Behind Author:Emily Raabe Finalist for the 2011 FUTURECYCLE POETRY BOOK PRIZE (Second Place) ________________________________________________________________________________________________ LEAVE IT BEHIND expresses the paradoxical wish of every poet, seeking to leave behind?in both senses of that phrase?the language trace of her mind and heart. And what a fine first... more » book Emily Raabe has left behind: vivid and strange, haunted by dreamed animals, alive with the landscapes and losses of her Vermont childhood. Raabe?s poetry seeks ?something like love/ in that it is the absence/ of distance??and yet it faces both absence and distance with unflinching imagination, intelligence and grace. ?Dan Chiasson, author of WHERE?S THE MOON, THERE?S THE MOON ________________________________________________________________________________________________ The poems in Emily Raabe?s first collection, LEAVE IT BEHIND, are distinct and imaginative. Often with a surreal edge, they have the intensity and grip of dream imagery and dream narrative: ?My best dream/ goes like this: two fields/ cut by a thin line of trees./ In the dream I?m at the line/ when the storm comes in.? And so the reader is immediately drawn into the poem with a sense of suspense in which the familiar has a strange and ominous aura. Raabe is able to find her identity in correlations between herself and the outer world as in ?Self-Portrait of a House?: ?If I were a house, I?d be a little/ green house, with peeling paint/ and an Ali Baba stairway/ to my swinging green screen door,? and so she invites her reader into a world of innuendo. Her poems possess an engaging freshness, and her debut as a new poet is to be welcomed. ?Robert Pack, author of LAUGHTER BEFORE SLEEP« less