Frank Lehner's new book, Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey, is a Pittsburgh pastoral. It is a love poem and a field guide to the unknown landscape that exists beneath and beyond the truisms about blue collar, industrial cities in America. Here, Lehner is the Whitman of his city. "I dress in the sacred garment of streets," he writes. And he drenches those streets in tenderness, generosity, and a welter of unexpected detail " Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey is a tribute to the unknownness of place, of the many surprising places this industrial city represents. This book is an eloquent revision. A revelation. -Lynn Emanuel
In his first full-length collection, Frank Lehner delivers a lifetime of earned wisdom, humility, and grace, taking us on pilgrimages to holy sites where we meet his beautiful, flawed saints. The poems resonate with the pulsing rhythms of Pittsburgh, the city he unabashedly loves. He finds the sacred in all small living things-insects, birds, flowers, animals....Through litany and urban legend, through incantations and prayer, Lehner lifts us into a spiritual world where the potential for totems is everywhere. Every penny found is a jewel with its own story to tell. Lehner doesn't imbue these totems with magic-he recognizes and pays tribute to the magic they already have. - Jim Daniels
Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey takes us into a Pittsburgh that's gone but will never go away, a place of bridges and stairs and tugboats, Skookum Field and the Iron City sign, where people and animals that share their space negotiate daily to survive, and to survive themselves. With ee cummings' inversion of language and a clear eye for the "beauty and indignity," Frank Lehner demands that we see anew. This book of hours has space for legend, for angry husbands and practical saints and stolen dogs and old soldiers -Valerie Nieman
