A rollicking, raucous, new myth, a classic…
A lyrical exploration of how a bully comes into being.
‘Why didn’t I get a Barbie Dreamhouse for Christmas?’ So asks Mina immediately after wondering if she’s a racist because she’s white too. Priorities, place and position move our hero from well-meaning child to disconcerted bully, borne by a fear of impotence in the world as she tests her own privileged, small power over others. Out From the Pleiades is a rich romp, chockfull of feel-good details and enough unanswered questions to make anyone secure in their moral center come, a tiny bit, undone. Ride in Mina’s ‘yolk-colored Subaru’ as she toes the surfaces of high school, passing through the stoic suicide of ‘Ginger, ’ until our war protestor comes full circle to the uncharted depths of ‘Yes’ in soldier Violet’s golden eyes - and discovers the harsher power of love’s undoing.
-Amy King, poet, I Want to Make You Safe and Slaves To Do These Things
Leslie McGrath’s Out from the Pleiades is a hybrid gem, a novella in verse that works utterly both as lyric poetry and as story. The life of protagonist Mina Kali, born to the Seven Sisters - a commune of radical warrior women –unfolds with an epic sweep, from the moment Mina ‘raged forth from the dark red dark’ to her final love and loss. Out from the Pleiades is a rollicking, raucous, new myth, a classic with its head in Aristophanes and its satiric heart in the 1960s. You will read these poems aloud, laughing, and then find them sneakily haunting you.
-Susanne Paola Antonetta, poet The Lives of the Saints, and author of Make Me a Mother: a memoir
Out from the Pleiades is a revealing character study, the story of Mina, a bully bred from the excesses of liberal culture. It’s a testament to the book’s complex vision that we both condemn and ultimately empathize with Mina as she makes her way through the world. It’s a master class in the psychology of intimidation, marked by McGrath’s signature wit, compassion and insight. -Bruce Snider, poet, Paradise, Indiana and The Year We Studied Women
