The Explosive Expert's Wife

by Shara Lessley

In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2018

Reviews

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, wise, compassionate book of poems that also somehow manages to be a page-turner. I read The Explosive Expert's Life without stopping - wanting to appreciate the gorgeousness and precision of the poems at the same time I wanted to stay with the narrator, to see what happened next. The poems delve into the speaker's life as wife and ex-pat in Jordan, and they look both outward and inward with empathy, curiosity, awakeness. Each poem can stand beautifully by itself - collected together, the poems make a rich tapestry, exploring profound change of all sorts: migration, pregnancy and birth, violence and the threat of violence both in the US and abroad. They also find unexpected beauty, wonderment, and a sense of home in the speaker's new life and country.

[Siobhan Fallon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As in her exceptional Two-Headed Nightingale, Shara Lessley miraculously manages to conjure up entire lives, cities, secrets, and dreams, in the brevity of a page or a stanza. The Explosive Expert’s Wife delves into characters dealing with discordance and dislocation, that of being Americans living in the Middle East, of being mothers sharing bodies with unborn children, of being wives unsure of what they are sharing with unfathomable spouses. Jordan blazes from each page, full of breath and fire, from its disappearing black irises, to young boys harassing a horse at Petra, to women harvesting fields of salt: “All’s beautiful. Because this country’s not just table grapes but the olives’ acidic skin.”
Though slim, this collection is vast and unforgettable. I highly recommend.

[Glori Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems, set in Jordan and elsewhere, examine the fragility of human bodies and the search for connection in a new home. Rich in setting and filled with the longing and wonder of the expatriate or exiled, they exist in the contradictions of life closely observed--the embrace of a new culture and the act of saying goodbye, birth and destruction.

The ends of these poems resonate as Lessley finds ways to make familiar images profound. I have always been haunted by the story of Lot's wife, who is turned to a pillar of salt after she looks back at her destroyed city, yet Lessley's poem keeps going to a surprising effect:

A single glance: what did she see? The dark/.../Somebody's wife, somebody's mother/whose daughters bedded their father in the urn-/like cave. She was no one--or perhaps, tending to/this need or that, she was always some/version of stone, whichever way she turned.

[Lysley · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE EXPLOSIVE EXPERT'S WIFE is a collection of poems about what it means to find a sense of home, in a place that may not be your own. These poems are smart and unsentimental, beautiful and honest. And I especially admire how they make no claims to fully understand or represent a culture and a place. Instead, they show the complexity, nuance, and singular reality of a person finding her way in a new world, in language that is sharp, lyrical, and unforgettable. This is book to read, to share, and--calling all creative writing teachers!-- to teach. Not only will the subject matter generate vital discussion, but the craft and technique of the writing will serve as models for any aspiring poet. Highly recommended--I can't wait to read Shara Lessley's next book.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shara Lessley is an incredible poet. Halfway through the book I stopped dog earing pages with poems I admired & wanted to come back to because there was no point - almost no pages were left unmarked. One fully inhabits the lives and experiences in these poems. This book is powerful & compelling & real without pander or sentimentality. Lessley’s truths are uncomfortable & hard nosed & sharp, sustained by the beauty of her lines & the elegance of her observations. Buy this book. Or borrow it. Or steal it if you have to. It’s worth it.

[Jeff Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's an explosive quality in the ways that The Explosive Expert's Wife manages to combine so many different concerns and strategies. It achieves, I think, something of a cross-genre triumph in that it unites the pleasures of a travel memoir — we learn about a place from a specific point of view — with all the immediate wallops of joy and emotion that only poetry can give you. Add in an honesty and complexity in the way that Lessley addresses larger historical and cultural concerns, and it all amounts to a remarkable reading experience.

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are crafted with such precision it takes my breath away. Lessley writes about the no man's land of being between two cultures and two countries, belonging fully to neither of them. Her poems insightfully explore the domestic (motherhood and marriage) within the larger framework of history and current events.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ex-pat experience is a humble-brag. Few poems come from travel. Fewer still from being an ex-pat. Lots of dense imagery in the narrative poems here, their language with few aims beyond the humble-brag.

[Sarah Nordgren · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are both precise and deeply felt. Highly recommended.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t even have words for how much I love this book.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

In English / tourist sounds like terrorist

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s amazing when poetry is informative. From the whale providing an ecosystem in her first collection, to the Unabomber in this one, Shara has stayed true to her brilliance.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh. This is so so good. So many ways that explosions are explored figurative and literal.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about love, survival, family, living in the Middle East, and the danger of life.

from Letter to Bruce in Paradise, Indiana: "I don't know / the name of the place or time / we'll see each other again, only that / a man invented the compass to pinpoint / the time for prayer. That here / they say a needle dropped into / a heart-shaped bowl points true / north, and you are there."

from The Ugly American: "it was then she felt // deep within the son she had forgotten. Please / understand this isn't metaphor: when // I dropped the rock, I had blood on my hand."

from The Explosive Expert's Wife: "The astronaut's suit smells like spent / gunpowder, the magazine says, meaning / the moon is the after- / math of war, o perhaps / it's the scent of satellites // orbiting long-dead stars."

[Kim Yi Dionne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember the last time a collection of poems moved me so much. They were so beautiful and personal. I look forward to reading the collection again and again.

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems walk in that place between danger and beauty.