Outside, America

Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These poems are tethered to everything from climate change and scientific discovery to the death of parents, resource extraction, divorce and career changes, touching down on whale extinctions, lounges in international airports and debris slides, on suiciding pilots and sinkholes, astronauts, grocery store magazines, earthquakes and even sinking ferries and pop stars.

“There is great tenderness in these poems, yet the emotion never feels overwrought, counterbalanced as it is by a high degree of craft, formal experimentation, and keen attention to a series of manufactured and natural curiosities woven uneasily together into a common life.” -Jenny Kerber, Canadian Literature, July 12, 2019

“De Leeuw is an acute chronicler of the physical world, both its natural beauty and the reverse ... These poems seduce quietly, drawing us without fanfare into the view from the poet’s gimlet eye.”