Audrey Gidman reviews
What Happened Was:
by Anna Leahy

Anna Leahy’s chapbook What Happened Was: charges forth with fistfuls of necessary brilliance, stuffing heartache and wind into its pockets and turning, over and over, to face the mic. Wrought with static lyricism and quick, stout language, Leahy pulls at her own experiences, and those of so many women, as though pulling at a loose thread, following it down and undoing what surrounds it. The book dismantles itself and becomes itself in multiplicities, shifting as each detail is named, each new glinting piece of rage erupting forth with precision and tired wisdom:

Underwater, that which is most volatile
is amplified when detonated,
sending out waves of pressure
in every direction, seemingly targetless
but full like noise and intentional.
No wonder I break,
strew my compartments, and sink. 

Leahy makes it plain: this grief is enormous and complex, running through the center of the book like a path lined with rocks that have been moved, kicked, dislodged, switched with other rocks and patted back down into slanted place. The slant—“the shadow of oneself that only the shadow knows”—is the story. The slant is history becoming the story over and over. The slant is the secret ache in the body. The slant is what happened.

Leahy makes it plain: we are resilient because we must be: “What happened was / I grew through and around and in between it all / whatever it was—or wasn’t—became me”. Leahy writes the “What Happened Was” poem again and again; the story is told and it’s a little different and it’s the same and it’s never enough so it’s told again: “A simple truth becomes sealed in a poem about something else. Enough is not enough.” 

Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry books What Happened Was:, Aperture, and Constituents of Matter and the nonfiction book Tumor. In addition to Tumor, which she wrote to make sense of cancer, Leahy co-wrote Conversing with Cancer to help patients, caregivers, providers, and communication specialists develop strategies to negotiate cancer care. She and Douglas R. Dechow wrote Generation Space: A Love Story. Anna Leahy is the editor and co-author of What We Talk About When We Talk about Creative Writing and Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom. She edits TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics and teaches at Chapman University.

Audrey Gidman is a queer poet living in Maine. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in SWWIM, Wax Nine, The West Review, The Shore, Luna Luna, Rogue Agent and elsewhere. Her chapbook, body psalms, winner of the Elyse Wolf Prize, is forthcoming from Slate Roof Press. Twitter // @audreygidman