LEAF TOWN BY AMY GORDON

In Leaf Town, poet Amy Gordon gives lyric treatment to an extraordinary moment during the COVID pandemic when “Leaf by leaf, word by word, the children build a town,” seeking a community of play on the town square which came to mimic the challenges in their young lives. In poems that beautifully render the sense of both creativity and loss, Gordon shows us the possibility of communion and the forces that emerge to threaten that precious impulse.

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Town Planning

It’s okay to fall, leaves, I’m going to use you all
to make Leaf Town sings Rose as she kneels

in the leaf-littered grass, and just as blood flows
from a central artery into multiple tributaries,

and nerve endings divide and re-divide
in a fractal effort to apprehend the world,

Rose, too, follows the pattern of creation
as she sweeps aside the leaves. Here’s

Main Street, and this one avenue
gives rise to another and then another,

until voices chorus in her ears:
We need a place to live.

Make us houses, Rose,
make us houses out of leaves.

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Word by word, with lyrical playfulness, the children in Amy Gordon’s Leaf Town take matters into their own hands and, leaf by leaf, build a world furnished with “everything society needs”—one where imagination supersedes greed, and innocence holds sorrow at bay. Gordon guides us back to individual and collective pasts shaped by wonder and intimate connection to the land. Made of leaf litter and invention, Leaf Town invites us to see the places we inhabit anew.
—Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Heartmoor

Marianne Moore defined poets as "literalists of the imagination" and poems as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Amy Gordon has taken this definition to heart and run with it to create a delightful (and serious) book. Based on a true story, the book is centered on a 9-year-old who builds a town made of fallen leaves. Leaf Town is at once both lyrical and philosophical.
—Alicia Ostriker, author of The Holy and Broken Bliss

In Leaf Town, poet/author Amy Gordon gathers the essence of small-town life by following a child building a town out of leaves. Gordon’s poems spin shimmers of storylines that reveal people’s underlying longings, wisps of hurts and griefs, while also celebrating the patient imagination of brave ones who tend to their art and their communities—crafting “leaf towns” of repair and healing. Readers will consider New England autumns anew with Gordon’s vivid Leaf Town.
—Holly Thompson, Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker

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Amy Gordon's poems have appeared in The Amsterdam Review, Ekphrastic Review, The Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Deep Fahrenheit (Prolific Press) and The Yellow Room (Finishing Line Press). Leaf Town is the winner of the 2023 Slate Roof Press Elyse Wolf Chapbook Prize. Before turning to poetry, she wrote and published numerous books for young readers, most notably The Gorillas of Gill Park and Painting the Rainbow. (Holiday House). She has two grown sons, two grandsons, and two cats. She lives in western Massachusetts and runs an after-school theater program.