Sharon Leiter

The Dream of Leaving
A finalist in the Main Street Rag 2007 national poetry competition, Leiter's second book of poems explores the wonders of maturity: the mysteries of owning a body and relinquishing it, of "losing everyone older or frailer" and figuring out how to hold on to them, of wishing for distances and burrowing into a house, of desire unleashed and desire modified. Passionately restrained, honest, and artful, these poems show Leiter as a master of le mot juste and the unsettling, unexpected metaphor.

Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work
"Although Emily Dickinson has so much to share with us, most of us need help in making the leap from our own modest passions, thoughts, and sensations to Dickinson's more intense and eccentric ones. We are lucky to have such a guide as Sharon Leiter - an accomplished poet as well as a scholar, and someone who is both eminently sensitive and eminently sensible in her approach to Dickinson. She brings her closer to us by clarifying the stranger parts, giving us insightful interpretations of the most compressed material, giving us a feel for how Dickinson thinks and translates her thinking into words. In short, she brings Dickinson's poems and person closer to us, so the leap between her "I" and our own is not so huge. This is a great service, because to have a poet like Emily Dickinson as a part of our lives, to make her our own by coming to love and understand her poems, is to deeply enrich our own experience of what it means to be alive."
-- Gregory Orr
Charlottesville, Virginia

Akhmatova's Petersburg
An Authors Guild Backinprin.com Editon, 2001

In the poetry of Anna Akhmatova the 19th century myth of "accursed" Petersburg, is reworked by a poet born in Imperial Russia and destined to confront the terrors of Soviet rule. Sharon Leiter "convincingly demonstrates that a good part of Akhmatova's verse could never have been written but for...Petersburg..."

The Lady and the Bailiff of Time
Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974

"These poems combine an uncommon degree of intensity, effortlessness, and imaginative energy. With a facility of metaphor, Leiter unsettles the barriers between the real and the unreal until an allegorical texture is what remains. The poems explore without sentimentality the panorama of human emotions."