Description:
The Eaten focuses on the grief and heartbreaking loss of children unborn, children not had, and the fear of not having children as the window of time for that possibility begins to close.
Brief description: Leah Saint Marie is an investigative journalist turned filmmaker. During her time as a reporter for the Innocence Institute she helped exonerate a man from prison who had spent 25 years wrongfully convicted. As a filmmaker she wrote the award-winning documentary, Price of Honor, which got Yaser Said on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted (the documentary led to his eventual arrest in 2021). Her script, Spoonful of Sugar, premiered at Fantastic Fest (2022) and was sold to Shudder. Her short film, Good Girl, won the Paris International Film Festival. For two years she served as a field producer for the social justice documentary film company, Brave New Films, where she traveled around the United States on a Ford grant interviewing youth activists. Her poetry book, The Eaten, is being published in 2023 through April Gloaming Publishing. She's producing the podcasts, Before the Fade, and Pitch! She's set to direct her next feature film, Teatro dell'Amore in Italy in 2024. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA, along with her cat, Edith Piaf.
Review Quotes:
"A rich, complex, sharp collection of poetry, sometimes strange and often strangely, hauntingly beautiful. Ferocious poems that are also resonant with song-like turns and tonal surprises. The double rhythms (of violence and tenderness, of animal and human, of sexual hunger and the body's losses) pull us in and hold us in thrall like a heartbeat."
- Karen Connelly, author of The Lizard Cage & The Change Room
"Diamonds. That's what the poems that inhabit Leah Saint Marie's constellational debut are: diamonds. Small and brilliant, they radiate the 'careful violence' that is so often the residue of the 'earned ache of something unfinished.' And like diamonds, the slightest turn reveals a sudden unexpected flash: some small, yet essential, detail of 'this nowness' that, without the eye of an exquisite poet, would risk being lost forever as the 'world rockets forth / in a finite trajectory.'"
- Scott Navicky, author of Humboldt & If You Give Me a Lily, I'll Make It a Field: The Wexner Lectures
"Encounters first and last, with the tides and the seasons, the cosmos, and the inner workings of the mind and the heart, in every poem a journey and a discovery."
- Meedo Taha, author of A Road to Damascus
"Leah Saint Marie's voice is just as savage as it is vulnerable. Her ability to balance all the intricate complexities of family dynamics on a line of well-crafted prose left me aching."
- Morgan Nikola-Wren, author of Magic with Skin On