Death of a Ventriloquist

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic, and Poetry Northwest. In 2011 he was named one of Maine’s “emerging leaders” by the Portland Press Herald and MaineToday Media for his work directing The Telling Room, where he still occasionally teaches writing. He lives with his family in Portland, Maine.

“What drives the poems in this wonderfully animated debut volume and prompts the reader’s pleasure in them is the patent honesty of the poet’s voice. In the ‘ventriloquist’ series itself, Fay-LeBlanc creates a remarkable refracted self-portrait, bristling with moments of unabashed illumination.”—Eamon Grennan, author of Out of Sight |“In the words of visual artist Paul Klee, whose synaesthetically suggestive work inspires this manuscript, ‘art doesn’t reproduce what we can see, it makes it visible.’ The turf of these poems is a ‘vision country’ in which our narrator / ventriloquist makes visible (and audible) the world to which he restlessly attends, offering up the ‘voices’ of everything. Formally deft, these poems address the limits and grace of lyric poetry.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Satin Cash and judge