In her new collection, Leslie Ullman explores the possibilities that may surface—erotic, spiritual—when familiar dualisms (Mind/Body, Dream/Waking Life, Animate/Inanimate) fall away. We may become “harmless as the crane or butterfly” or find “the mountain / opens in us a third eye to find / the places that will let us fly / safely and land without breaking.” Although “we hacked our way to the asphalt,” Ullman’s language for mindfulness allows us to grasp “an ocean we can borrow any time / we cup our minds around it like hands.” This book illustrates, poem by poem, how metaphor maps a route to connection and transformation. Read these poems and feel awake in ways familiar and strange at once.
—Robin Becker, author of Domain of Perfect Affection
“Leslie Ullman at last publishes her fourth book, Progress on the Subject of Immensity, to reveal the strength of the human mind at work on questions of its own purpose. At home in the natural world, the poet speaks from silence to wonder if ‘. . . perhaps someday we’ll / think twice before we / place footprints over a green / so fresh it seems part sun.’ Part meditation, part revelation, Ullman has written a masterpiece.”—Hilda Raz, Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series editor
“Ullman draws me along inextricably in this progress, with her attentiveness to inner and outer worlds that is a form of reverence. Her words hover in the mind, making their own weather.”—Carole Simmons Oles, author of Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer
