Hailey Leithauser

cantfindit

Poet Hailey Leithauser was born in Baltimore and raised in Maryland and Central Florida. Leithauser has worked as a salad chef, real estate office manager, gourmet food salesperson, freelance copy editor, phone surveyor, bookstore clerk, fact checker, and, most recently, senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy in Washington, DC. Returning to writing after a break of several decades, her work has appeared widely, in publications such as Poetry magazine, Crazyhorsethe Gettysburg Review, and Best American Poetry. Leithauser is the author of the poetry collections Saint Worm (Able Muse Press, 2019) and Swoop (Graywolf Press, 2013), winner of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award. She is the recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Prize, and an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she is a coordinator for the Café Muse reading series. Source

Form

In pattern affirm

expansion of thought.

 

In vagueness draw taut.

In craft avoid charm.

 

When jaded, transform.

When cast small, exploit

 

what is small. When brought

to extremes conform

 

if what is conformed

takes widening weight.

 

When rigid be wrought.

When assumed, disarm.

 

When fervor is sought

yield frenzy of storm.

 

Published:

2003

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Agency

Ars Poetica

Poetic Form

Strength & Resilience

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Consonance

the recurrence of similar sounds, especially consonants, in close proximity

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

End Rhyme

when a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same

Sonnet

A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.