Dawn Leas' chapbook A Person Worth Knowing (Foothills Publishing, 2021) is a collection about people: dental hygienists and DJs, real estate agents and flight instructors, gardeners and garbage men. It is a book comprised of mothers and daughters, couples suffering through illnesses and unhappy marriages, historical figures and the people you pass on the way to work. 

Almost every poem is dedicated to an individual whom we get to know through the eyes of the poet. Adept at characterization, Leas sketches the contours of a life, opening up innumerable possibilities and letting our imaginations fill in the gaps. She grants us access to heartbreak, like a cancer patient's last New Year's Eve celebration, the dying woman's laughter, still able to "paper the walls." In "How to live paycheck to paycheck," we overhear a medical staffer's conversation, how her daughter's meager holiday gifts are on layaway again this year: "winter coat, school clothes, / one video game -- / that's it." In "Nursing Home Story," we are transported to a long-term care facility, forced to hear the "muffled wails" of the elderly, the depressing "fight song / of a dying generation." 

Leas' poems are quiet vignettes about strangers. Through these narratives, we gain insight into their routines, their struggles, their triumphs. But we also learn about the poet. It is by telling the stories of others that Leas reveals what is important to her: She loves music and art, understands that the "hiss of a [record player] needle / can heal almost any wound." She values perseverance and hard work, able to identify "the perfect V pattern" of a housewife's busy vacuum. She honors ancestry, knows that even a simple article of clothing, like the hand-me-down described in the poem "Trench Coat," can reveal much about a person's past and future: 

Standing on the corner

of success and failure

he's dressed in a custom blue blazer

starched white shirt

a Jerry Garcia tie knotted

just tight enough 

to cause slight discomfort

and a trench coat his grandfather wore

every day of his working life —

rain or shine. 

She is empathetic, relates to an old woman's loneliness and longing as she waits for a bus, wants to know "who she once was." Time and time again, Leas perceives the subtleties of experience and describes them in exacting detail. That's a poet worth knowing.

June, 2021