Teresa Leo is the author of the poetry collection The Halo Rule, which won the Elixir Press Editors’ Prize. She is the recipient of a Pew fellowship, a Leeway Foundation grant, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships, and the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She serves on the board of Musehouse, a center for the literary arts in Philadelphia, and works at the University of Pennsylvania.

Other poems by Teresa Leo in Verse Daily:
February 10, 2008:   "Narcissists Anonymous" "A jackal among hedgehogs. At the meeting..."

Books by Teresa Leo:

Other poems on the web by Teresa Leo:
Two poems
Three poems

Teresa Leo's Website.

About Bloom in Reverse:

"Clarity of feeling and insight still fight the battle for ‘hipness’ in American poetry, but Teresa Leo makes a large cut into the cold caverns of conceptualism by chronicling a friend’s suicide in a way that feels breathless and moving. Such amplitude and precision masterfully locate love and grief, making Bloom in Reverse a new frontier for being in the world and surviving."
—Major Jackson

"The nobility of Teresa Leo’s poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark—rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don’t win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling."
—Tony Hoagland

"Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse remembers a friend lost too soon, attempts to ‘disremember’ a callous lover, and emerges beautiful and wise, with unexpected, true connection. Couplets, haiku, fragments, and a sestina shape the elegiac fury and grief surrounding loss and obsession, each deepening and sometimes reversing memory. These poems serve as an honest homage to female camaraderie, as well as the sly and unpredictable nature of romantic love. Leo’s voice is honest and mesmerizing, both social—Tilt-A-Whirl and Skee-Ball and online dating—and inward—trapped inside a house for a month with only a wretched fly. She is a passionate and profoundly lyrical storyteller."
—Denise Duhamel