Leah Nielsen was raised in Norge and Williamsburg, Virginia. A graduate of Syracuse University and the University of Alabama, she currently teaches in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her poems have recently appeared in Cream City Review, Green Mountains Review, Passages North, and Puerto Del Sol. No Magic is her first collection of poems.

Other poems by Leah Nielsen in Verse Daily:
February 26, 2003:  "Apology, a Love Poem" "How the small fire reaches into the fallen branches..."

About No Magic:

"What is it that grief does to language, when ‘fatigue fills the mow like dust’? What if ‘Gap-tooth and Tooth-grinder, the chariot goats’ haul a story so unmouthable, untameable, unappeasable, that the telling of it makes ‘all the words sound like lur’? Leah Nielsen’s language is a hard-won conjury combining elegy and myth to create the sound and pulse, the many pulses, of what’s true. No Magic is a deeply moving, masterful debut."
—Robin Behn

"The magic of No Magic is that Leah Nielsen makes out of snow, fallow fields, flatness and nearly annihilating losses a recuperative, thawing thing. She casts a spell on the Mid-West. She summons the Norse gods to hammer a world into being and then lick it into shape. She does not miss anything in the tangle and flame of grief and joy. Like Billie Holiday, she sings of hunger and love, and through the language of these poems, we’re charmed from our fear into wonder."
—Bruce Smith