Washington Writers' Publishing House

Testimonials

• An insightful and moving exploration of Black and Native American history and culture, Leda’s Daughters is high-caliber poetic research. Berlin’s poetry transforms our sensibility about major historical figures and events. It is a loving, sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful, ode to struggle, survival, and inheritance.

  Kara Keeling, Author of Queer Times, Black Futures

• K. Avvrin Berlin’s Leda’s Daughters earns its title: these gorgeous poems are creatures and consequences of racialized violence—which is to say that they are poems about our contemporary world. Not only Leda’s rape but Lot’s Daughters’ incest, Saint Joan’s martyrdom, Virginia Woolf’s suicide, Sojourner Truth’s truths, John Brown’s body, Harriet Jacobs’s loophole of retreat, Iphigenia’s sacrifice, Pocahontas’s fate are all transported over space and time to Harlem, Birmingham, Georgia, the New South, the Dismal Swamp, Charleston in 1867, North Dakota now. Myths turn into flesh and bone. This book is the painfully admirable accomplishment of a poet who is herself a new and stunning figure on the oldest of poetic horizons.

  Virginia W. Jackson, UCI Endowed Chair of Rhetoric, Author of Dickinson’s Misery and Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric

• K. Avvirin Berlin’s poetry sings of the ways that myth undergirds all that we see while it reminds us of the material bodies we must use to approach such stories. Leda’s Daughters re-illuminates those myths that surround us, and like an art conservator using language as her restorative tool, Berlin brushes away what has become too familiar so that she might reveal some startling, new way of experiencing that which has been concealed just beneath the surface. We are honored to name it this year’s winner, and we are excited to make a home for it at WWPH.

  Tonee Moll, 2022 winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Award for You Cannot Save Here