What Happened Was: by Anna Leahy (Harbor Editions, 2021) is an exploratory poetic utterance, a collection of prompt-inspired collage and anaphora underpinned by an unresolved anxiety and threat. The formal structures and the repetition tie this collection together.  

The final poem in the collection, “What Happened Was ______________________________ ,” invites the reader to “draw a blank / fill it in.” I felt compelled to follow Leahy’s invitation (I hope you are, as well!) and found it difficult not to pull from my own experiences to fill in the blanks, to see myself in so many of the other poems, while re-reading. That blank space becomes an invitation to empathize, to tell one’s personal stories. Leahy also pulls from the personal, and fills in the blanks with feminine power and conflict, fills in these blanks with fairness, rape/abuse, herstory, power, and darkness. Her reflections often bear witness to the stories, as an outsider, as “the shadow of oneself that only the shadow knows.” The reader floats in the in-between spaces, around the margins, and in the blanks along with Leahy. Backgrounded, the reader and speaker alike make way for the narrative, hold a spotlight on each story. “What happened was,” is always a way to highlight the importance of what follows.

The poem “The Center that Does Not Hold” tries to hold the middle ground between the speaker/reader and the narrative: 

Your life’s middling, at best. At worst, it’s middling too. [ both/and ] Manage the middle; hit your average. You’re not happy and want to change your horse, your convictions. [neither/nor] You raise the finger. You feel mean. The middle has a long tail and so many choices that go nowhere…

You try to change your tune, strike a chord tympanic— [ entryway : vestibule :: exit : vertigo ] —hammer against anvil, foot in stirrup. You’re blood-dull and falling apart. You’re about to split.

and in the attempt acknowledges how tenuous that middle ground is. In the poem “Sheets” that shaky middle ground between us and the narrative becomes yet another aspect of the narrative to highlight: “in the eye of the storm, the beginning and the end: two points in search of / the perpendicular.” 

What Happened Was: takes its cue from this idea, that two points can be perpendicular, both connected and in opposition to one another, and that connection and opposition frame a narrative that highlights the what and the happened over the who and the why.

May, 2021