THE SLOW HAMMER OF ROOTS, poetry by Lea Marshall
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Paperback, 70 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-00-0
In Lea Marshall’s visionary debut collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots, poems gently suspend the reader in Time, actively and avidly dissecting past, present, and future with grace and wonder. Marshall’s deep-sweeping journey reaches back to the beginning of grass, explores Lee’s surrender at Appomattox where her 4th-great grandfather was aide de camp, follows a series of future folktales, and even hypothesizes Totality. Roots weave themselves “through concrete, their own heart— / the deathly intertwining of desire / and waste.” These roots, both healthy and strangling, bond Marshall to the immediate family she knows and to slaveholding ancestors she is just discovering. She asks, “Do we light // a fire now that glimmers down the loop/of time until it reaches each of them?” Marshall illuminates truths over many years covered and recovered with vivid and vast imagery, a perfectly constant state of lost and found. The moon's bright light can disrupt the world and comprehension, yet the “heart will lift a little, like the grass.”
Praise for Lea Marshall & The Slow Hammer of Roots
These poems take my breath away, their visceral beauty and dark truth. The twelve Future Folk Tales threaded throughout are by themselves worth the price of admission. Lea Marshall knows both nature and humanity, past and present, and shows with nuance and delicacy how the one can profoundly illuminate the other.
—Jennifer Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds & The Bird Way
To enter into Lea Marshall’s mesmerizing debut collection The Slow Hammer of Roots is to be transported beyond our limited, frantic daily lives into the realm of deep-time, a space in which the future speaks to us as if it were already the past. ‘Roots’ here connotes not only the speaker’s family history in the American South (and her reckoning with that) but also our essential human rootedness in the natural world. Marshall’s magical vision is infused with hidden meanings and resonances. These chiseled poems invite readers into a landscape in which it is possible to be instructed by folk-tales not yet written, as vanishing animals, insects, and the earth itself instruct us in powerfully moving and mysterious ways.
—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City
Lea Marshall’s The Slow Hammer of Roots brings us an incisive, moving new voice in American poetry. These are poems of delicate but exacting images that reckon with our human mistakes, calling for urgent change in the ways people treat one another and the natural world. From her “Future Folk Tales” sequence, which threads through the book, looking beyond human mythmaking— beyond human prominence— is the wonderful “Future Folk Tales: Fireflies,” in which the fireflies who “somehow still emerged... though not as many as before” are the ones to speak to us (who may be gone by the time we really listen): “Don’t mistake us for innocence, / they said, constellating on a thundery / evening. We know the dark and we string / it through the trees you left behind.” In other poems we hear from the Saharan Desert, warning us of our thirst, and from a crow beside a second, dead crow on a highway: she turns her back on “your awful wonder/at my grief.” The precision with which these scenes are rendered makes the mysterious clarity of what they communicate real, immediate, and pressing.
—Debra Nystrom, author of Night Sky Frequencies: New and Selected Poems
From its first poem, “History of the Grass”—“we are the grain / and the cow. Where your body falls we hold your shape. / We spear through time. After fire, we are the first to return”—Lea Marshall’s haunted and haunting debut collection reveals its kinship with the biophilic cosmos of Walt Whitman. In beautifully wrought poems both specular and speculative, and at times fabular, in their loves and elegies, Marshall explores the “roots” that not only connect humans with the imperiled natural world, but also historical and familial systems of intergenerational trauma, violence, culpability, and responsibility. A series of “Future Folk Tales” celebrates and mourns a litany of endangered entities—mosquitoes, doves, egrets, forests, luna moths. “On the day / the waves first broke they breathed a sound / so new and fine we shuddered,” she writes in “Future Folk Tales: Stone & Water,” “and heard / the song as our own ending until we learned / to keep water’s secrets in the world we made / together, breaking each other, re-forming, / breaking and re-forming, laughing, / roaring, singing, crumbling inside time, / revealing it as elastic as ourselves.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems
About the Author
Lea Marshall’s writing has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere and her poetry has been published in journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, JAMA, Diode, and Rogue Agent. She worked as a producer and arts administrator for over 20 years, earning her MFA along the way from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently works as a grant writer and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Paperback, 70 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-00-0
In Lea Marshall’s visionary debut collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots, poems gently suspend the reader in Time, actively and avidly dissecting past, present, and future with grace and wonder. Marshall’s deep-sweeping journey reaches back to the beginning of grass, explores Lee’s surrender at Appomattox where her 4th-great grandfather was aide de camp, follows a series of future folktales, and even hypothesizes Totality. Roots weave themselves “through concrete, their own heart— / the deathly intertwining of desire / and waste.” These roots, both healthy and strangling, bond Marshall to the immediate family she knows and to slaveholding ancestors she is just discovering. She asks, “Do we light // a fire now that glimmers down the loop/of time until it reaches each of them?” Marshall illuminates truths over many years covered and recovered with vivid and vast imagery, a perfectly constant state of lost and found. The moon's bright light can disrupt the world and comprehension, yet the “heart will lift a little, like the grass.”
Praise for Lea Marshall & The Slow Hammer of Roots
These poems take my breath away, their visceral beauty and dark truth. The twelve Future Folk Tales threaded throughout are by themselves worth the price of admission. Lea Marshall knows both nature and humanity, past and present, and shows with nuance and delicacy how the one can profoundly illuminate the other.
—Jennifer Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds & The Bird Way
To enter into Lea Marshall’s mesmerizing debut collection The Slow Hammer of Roots is to be transported beyond our limited, frantic daily lives into the realm of deep-time, a space in which the future speaks to us as if it were already the past. ‘Roots’ here connotes not only the speaker’s family history in the American South (and her reckoning with that) but also our essential human rootedness in the natural world. Marshall’s magical vision is infused with hidden meanings and resonances. These chiseled poems invite readers into a landscape in which it is possible to be instructed by folk-tales not yet written, as vanishing animals, insects, and the earth itself instruct us in powerfully moving and mysterious ways.
—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City
Lea Marshall’s The Slow Hammer of Roots brings us an incisive, moving new voice in American poetry. These are poems of delicate but exacting images that reckon with our human mistakes, calling for urgent change in the ways people treat one another and the natural world. From her “Future Folk Tales” sequence, which threads through the book, looking beyond human mythmaking— beyond human prominence— is the wonderful “Future Folk Tales: Fireflies,” in which the fireflies who “somehow still emerged... though not as many as before” are the ones to speak to us (who may be gone by the time we really listen): “Don’t mistake us for innocence, / they said, constellating on a thundery / evening. We know the dark and we string / it through the trees you left behind.” In other poems we hear from the Saharan Desert, warning us of our thirst, and from a crow beside a second, dead crow on a highway: she turns her back on “your awful wonder/at my grief.” The precision with which these scenes are rendered makes the mysterious clarity of what they communicate real, immediate, and pressing.
—Debra Nystrom, author of Night Sky Frequencies: New and Selected Poems
From its first poem, “History of the Grass”—“we are the grain / and the cow. Where your body falls we hold your shape. / We spear through time. After fire, we are the first to return”—Lea Marshall’s haunted and haunting debut collection reveals its kinship with the biophilic cosmos of Walt Whitman. In beautifully wrought poems both specular and speculative, and at times fabular, in their loves and elegies, Marshall explores the “roots” that not only connect humans with the imperiled natural world, but also historical and familial systems of intergenerational trauma, violence, culpability, and responsibility. A series of “Future Folk Tales” celebrates and mourns a litany of endangered entities—mosquitoes, doves, egrets, forests, luna moths. “On the day / the waves first broke they breathed a sound / so new and fine we shuddered,” she writes in “Future Folk Tales: Stone & Water,” “and heard / the song as our own ending until we learned / to keep water’s secrets in the world we made / together, breaking each other, re-forming, / breaking and re-forming, laughing, / roaring, singing, crumbling inside time, / revealing it as elastic as ourselves.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems
About the Author
Lea Marshall’s writing has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere and her poetry has been published in journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, JAMA, Diode, and Rogue Agent. She worked as a producer and arts administrator for over 20 years, earning her MFA along the way from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently works as a grant writer and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Paperback, 70 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-00-0
In Lea Marshall’s visionary debut collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots, poems gently suspend the reader in Time, actively and avidly dissecting past, present, and future with grace and wonder. Marshall’s deep-sweeping journey reaches back to the beginning of grass, explores Lee’s surrender at Appomattox where her 4th-great grandfather was aide de camp, follows a series of future folktales, and even hypothesizes Totality. Roots weave themselves “through concrete, their own heart— / the deathly intertwining of desire / and waste.” These roots, both healthy and strangling, bond Marshall to the immediate family she knows and to slaveholding ancestors she is just discovering. She asks, “Do we light // a fire now that glimmers down the loop/of time until it reaches each of them?” Marshall illuminates truths over many years covered and recovered with vivid and vast imagery, a perfectly constant state of lost and found. The moon's bright light can disrupt the world and comprehension, yet the “heart will lift a little, like the grass.”
Praise for Lea Marshall & The Slow Hammer of Roots
These poems take my breath away, their visceral beauty and dark truth. The twelve Future Folk Tales threaded throughout are by themselves worth the price of admission. Lea Marshall knows both nature and humanity, past and present, and shows with nuance and delicacy how the one can profoundly illuminate the other.
—Jennifer Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds & The Bird Way
To enter into Lea Marshall’s mesmerizing debut collection The Slow Hammer of Roots is to be transported beyond our limited, frantic daily lives into the realm of deep-time, a space in which the future speaks to us as if it were already the past. ‘Roots’ here connotes not only the speaker’s family history in the American South (and her reckoning with that) but also our essential human rootedness in the natural world. Marshall’s magical vision is infused with hidden meanings and resonances. These chiseled poems invite readers into a landscape in which it is possible to be instructed by folk-tales not yet written, as vanishing animals, insects, and the earth itself instruct us in powerfully moving and mysterious ways.
—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City
Lea Marshall’s The Slow Hammer of Roots brings us an incisive, moving new voice in American poetry. These are poems of delicate but exacting images that reckon with our human mistakes, calling for urgent change in the ways people treat one another and the natural world. From her “Future Folk Tales” sequence, which threads through the book, looking beyond human mythmaking— beyond human prominence— is the wonderful “Future Folk Tales: Fireflies,” in which the fireflies who “somehow still emerged... though not as many as before” are the ones to speak to us (who may be gone by the time we really listen): “Don’t mistake us for innocence, / they said, constellating on a thundery / evening. We know the dark and we string / it through the trees you left behind.” In other poems we hear from the Saharan Desert, warning us of our thirst, and from a crow beside a second, dead crow on a highway: she turns her back on “your awful wonder/at my grief.” The precision with which these scenes are rendered makes the mysterious clarity of what they communicate real, immediate, and pressing.
—Debra Nystrom, author of Night Sky Frequencies: New and Selected Poems
From its first poem, “History of the Grass”—“we are the grain / and the cow. Where your body falls we hold your shape. / We spear through time. After fire, we are the first to return”—Lea Marshall’s haunted and haunting debut collection reveals its kinship with the biophilic cosmos of Walt Whitman. In beautifully wrought poems both specular and speculative, and at times fabular, in their loves and elegies, Marshall explores the “roots” that not only connect humans with the imperiled natural world, but also historical and familial systems of intergenerational trauma, violence, culpability, and responsibility. A series of “Future Folk Tales” celebrates and mourns a litany of endangered entities—mosquitoes, doves, egrets, forests, luna moths. “On the day / the waves first broke they breathed a sound / so new and fine we shuddered,” she writes in “Future Folk Tales: Stone & Water,” “and heard / the song as our own ending until we learned / to keep water’s secrets in the world we made / together, breaking each other, re-forming, / breaking and re-forming, laughing, / roaring, singing, crumbling inside time, / revealing it as elastic as ourselves.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems
About the Author
Lea Marshall’s writing has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere and her poetry has been published in journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, JAMA, Diode, and Rogue Agent. She worked as a producer and arts administrator for over 20 years, earning her MFA along the way from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently works as a grant writer and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.