POETRY

Breathe Here
Selected Poems

by Ellie O'Leary

​Breathe Here begins with a child tethered to story and moves from that child’s perspective--prematurely widened by death--through a young woman’s search for better options, to the hardest won of mature grace notes. These plainspoken, often wry, and craftily woven poems reveal trauma as a threshold through which change and new freedoms are discovered. Here, O’Leary not only gives witness to endurance and survival, but to poetry’s ability to console and sustain, to create both home and breathing space.
       —Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo and Curious Conduct
​Breathe Here, Ellie O’Leary’s debut collection of poems, is about living a life for all it’s worth. O’Leary reflects on childhood, family, identity, loss, place, seasons, fluffernutter sandwiches, and being human, especially when it hurts being human. “I stand embraced, like a small island, letting the moist air take me, too,” says the speaker in “Morning Fog,” and that image lingers and sings in my head after reading these beautifully crafted and accessible poems.
 —Gary Rainford, author of Salty Liquor and Liner Notes
​Like a Bildungsroman, Ellie O’Leary’s memoir-in-verse begins with the tribulations of growing up in Freedom, Maine, in the disorientating wake of her mother’s early death and her father’s indifference to her presence in his life. The alienated and questioning voice of the young girl gives way to mature reflection as the poet confronts the challenges of a failing marriage and breast cancer. The woman who emerges at book’s end can justifiably assert “. . . I plow / on through the terrors I once fled. / The dark can no longer take me / to the tightness I felt alone.” O’Leary invites her readers to follow on this journey from Freedom, Maine, to the ultimate freedom of triumphant self- determination.
—Richard Foerster, author of Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems
 
​In her poem “Same Soul”, Ellie asks the river “Where are you going, even though you are always here?” Ellie and I both grew up in Waldo County, in Maine, and, as Ellie says in another poem “Every truth has a backstory.” Every life has a backstory, and Ellie’s rises out of Freedom, Maine--a life of loss, disease, uncertainty, yet a life which sings itself out in poetry, and in beauty. I can feel the place, see it, and I can hear Ellie, telling her truth, but now “living now, in grace and gratitude”. We should be grateful to have these stories, well told, in truth and grace.
          —Gary Lawless, poet and co-owner Gulf of Maine Books, Brunswick, Maine
 
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​Ellie O’Leary grew up in the village of Freedom, Maine, and writes about it from many angles. Her writing has brought her opportunities—hosting a radio show, teaching poetry and organizing a new writing program at an Adirondacks   retreat center, and earning an MFA in Maine’s Stonecoast program. She is now a resident of Amesbury, Massachusetts where she serves as Poet Laureate.