The Mystery of Meteors

"Eleanor Lerman's 1970s books, Armed Love and Come the Sweet By and By, contained some of the most powerful, beautiful, and original poems ever written by an American poet. It was not amiss to summon comparison with Dickinson, Rimbaud, and Rilke (today we could add Paul Celan). Then, a Rimbaudian blank, twenty plus years of silence. Now, amazingly, Eleanor Lerman is back, a different poet, quieter, older, 'wiser,' more earthly yet still brilliant, a coruscating daughter of the poet of the Seventies. What luck for American literature." —Richard Stein

"Eleanor Lerman's poems in The Mystery of Meteors, as passionately questing as her brilliant early work, inhabit a vastly larger literal and emotional landscape. The momentum of Lerman's long cadences, the sureness and fluency of her syntax, the pithiness of her unmistakably American speech, are pleasures in themselves. They serve a vision steeped in paradox, as certain of the joy of 'life, life, life going on' as of the unresolvable ancient questions these poems articulate with intelligence and authority. I'm moved to hear this poet's voice again. Eleanor Lerman is a great and gifted original." —Joan Larkin