Sympathetic Magic

Amy Fleury’s bewitching new collection of poems, Sympathetic Magic, unveils the everyday manifestations of sympathy as well as the connections wrought by “sympathetic magic”—that indelible tether that binds people, places, and objects across time and distance. Fleury’s lyrics journey across the landscapes of childhood and old age, body and spirit, past and future, exploring the boundless permutations of sympathy as it appears in the most surprising locations. Connections reveal themselves in the aggressive silence of the small town or the round penmanship of a loved one, and echo throughout the solitude and regeneration of the forest as well as the antiseptic air of the hospital. At the center of these travels lies the narrator, stretching her limbs from the heart of the heartland, her body a compass summoning us from all directions, emphasizing with tender simplicity that “we all live under the self-same moon, no matter the phase.”

Amy Fleury is the author of a collection of poems, Beautiful Trouble, published by SIU Press, and the director of the M.F.A. program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, River Styx, and Crazyhorse. She was the 2009–10 Amy Clampitt Resident Poetry Fellow.