Description: Mark Leidner's third poetry collection, Elegy for Pangaea, is as funny, strange, and epic as his two previous collections, Returning the Sword to the Stone and Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me. His new poems explore faith, grief, money, myth, parenting, and poetry itself to create a collection as full of tantalizing ideas and dilemmas as "an enormous library with a waterbed floor." As mystical as it is satirical, as audacious as it is personal, as hysterical as it is disconcerting, in Elegy for Pangaea, Leidner once again shows us that the only way out of irony is through.
Brief description: Mark Leidner's previous poetry collections are Returning the Sword to the Stone (Fonograf Editions, 2021), Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011), and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator/Two Dollar Radio, 2011). He also wrote the story collection Under the Sea (Tyrant Books, 2018), called "virtuosic" by the New York Times. One of the stories from that collection, "21 Extremely Bad Breakups," won the 2015 Newfound Prose Prize and in 2018 was adapted for the stage by Amy Rummenie of the Walking Shadow Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Mark also wrote and produced the 2019 feature-length sci-fi thriller Empathy, Inc., which earned rave reviews in Variety, The AV Club, and The Verge and is available on streaming platforms. Mark is a graduate of the University of Georgia, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He grew up in Tifton, GA and now lives in northern California. His website is markleidner.com