“‘The country poor used to mark graves / with their best piece of china—chipped bowl, / butter dish,’ their tribute a form of ensoulment. And the poet who beholds this gesture in all its native eloquence has made of it an ars poetica. I know no writer whose vision is more generous, more inclusive than that of Eric Leigh. The thirteen-year-old girl who feeds a houseful of siblings on dandelion greens, the machinist working the midnight shift, the drag queen, the barman, the heroin addict on the bus: poetry cannot keep them from harm, but it can, in the deft hands of Leigh, endow them with mortal radiance.”

—Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep

“At one end of Eric Leigh’s world men come home from work smelling of oil and two guys who hit a deer know it has to be butchered immediately, ‘before the blood settles, spoils the meat.’ At the other end are drag bars, viral loads, the struggle of love, fleeting beauty: ‘That’s what we do, Dear. Some boys / shoot things; we dress windows.’ Throughout his remarkable range Leigh maintains traction on the tight curves and steep slopes of feeling, steering through disappointment and heartbreak to clearsighted poise and the fine lift of his endings. The poems of Harm’s Way have somewhere to go, and they know how to work to get there: they leave us convinced that they had to be written.”

—James Richardson, author of By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms

“Eric Leigh writes of loss in poems that are deeply moving and yet unsentimental. Reading his first collection, Harm’s Way, I’m struck by his intensity and eloquence. He has the charm of a storyteller with a wide range of settings, from an empty farmhouse in a factory town to a lively beerhall to a drag bar. A sequence, ‘The Dark-Light of Spring,’ courageously recounts a violent family death. The title poem has me enthralled.”

—Grace Schulman, author of The Broken String