Jean LeBlanc • At Any Moment

LeBlanc’s poems exquisitely render several worlds: images of a New England childhood replete with their reticent delight and sorrow; the hidden landscape of a teacher’s connection with her students, and the chaos of the garden gone wild. At Any Moment leads us to anticipate and to discover the joy slipped through our fingers, and we are never disappointed. The deft lines and language craft a place in which we somehow find those worlds of our own.
   • Priscilla Orr, Jugglers & Tides

To read Jean LeBlanc’s At Any Moment is to fall in love with poetry all over again. If I thought I could get by with it, I’d steal a dozen of these poems and call them my own. Reader, trust me—"What’s here will be exactly what you need."
   • David Huddle, Summer Lake: New & Selected Poems and Grayscale

How does Jean LeBlanc make her poems so comfortably alive? Her candor, yes. Images already there. Full of surprise, but amiably free of shock. She is one of us, being singular. Such a pleasure, then, to enter and re-enter her world, poem after poem, and to share in the canny play of her language, to follow the casual gambits of her agile mind as she turns the commonplace on its ear. On her ear. I laughed out loud. I’m so pleased. I ache with the unexpected familiarity of her feelings. Her fancies. I find I am thinking of her as Jeannie. Look out! Look out! It’s like falling in love again. I’m going to read At Any Moment, one poem a day, to my wife.
   • Edward Lueders, The Clam Lake Papers, Writing Natural History,
     Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, and Like Underground Water:
     The Poetry of Mid-Twentieth Century Japan