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Of this startling fresh poetic voice Alicia Ostriker has remarked: "Read Lea Banks for vitality, read her for velocity. Dance with her if you dare, catch her if you can. But beware - Banks is a poet of a thousand whirling metaphors. You'll have to move fast." 

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Carol Frost says of this remarkable poet's first chapbook: "Carnival, whirlpool, God's fierce whimsy, beauty's blackout, hot color, Devil: they all belong to Lea Banks. She invokes the phenomenal, and from behind parted fingers her readers peek. The poems in All of Me are brave-spirited and they make all of us braver." 

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A 2009 review on Masslive.com Valley Poetry by Allegra Mira featured Shelburne Falls Poet, Lea Banks.

"Last week I attended Lea Banks' reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Lea read with three New Jersey poets: Joe Weil, Danny Shot and the late Jack Wiler.

Standing on stage in a black skirt, red pumps and a red tee-shirt that she designed quoting lusty R&B soul singer Denise Lasalle, Lea seemed like a royal cowgirl from the school of life, touring us through a world where physical pain and physical beauty serve to compliment and define each other. In the darkened audience, I felt myself become hooked by her wordflow, and dragged along through a current of private moments, all of them somehow familiar."

"It's the burned life we had, firewalkers. Flame orange frames the lunar eclipse." -- from "All of Me"

 

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"Fiery. Language rich but not heavy-handed. A fast dance. This is the new face of poetry." Lynne Thompson, author of "Beg No Pardon."

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"This book is a five-star must have. Lea does not hold back. She has a fresh, honest and brave heart and is willing to risk herself for love. This is the voice of an adventurous spirit. The limited art edition is truly a work of art. You won't be able to put it down and you will find yourself returning to Lea's poems many times." Sandra Azmitia, author of the memoir, Do It Differently! Do It Differently!

 

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Two of Lea's poems, "All of Me" and "Hallelujah" from her book ALL OF ME, were nominated for the 2009 pushcart prize. She was also finalist for the Pavel Strut Fellowship in Prague. 

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 Beth Kanell of Kingdom Books' review of All of Me:

Honest, Vivid, and Worth It: Lea Banks and Her Poetry, ALL OF ME

 

Word arrived this week that Lea Banks is stepping down from her three years of labor with the Shelburne Falls (MA) poetry series, Collected Poets -- and although I'm sure the series folks will miss her, it's a good thing too, because it's sure to mean more poems from Banks herself.

Her collection ALL OF ME proves that writing the wild side of life can be provocative on multiple levels: How do we get ourselves into the turmoil of sexuality, romance, breakups, heartbreak, and those unforgettable laughter-filled moments that come between kisses? Banks declares she's "not the goddess or goodness / I wish to be" as she inks her longings, lusts, and loves. If only we knew, at age 16 or 20, that heartbreak is the rototiller of the garden that will later bring lush blossoms and fruit!  In "St. George's Waltz," Banks writes:

 ... She was a tavern, a dance
hall of heartbeats spun around
his loving. A girl grown dizzy
with desire a loss, her limits
an abrasion of incapacity.

She knocks about in sweaty sleep.
Feverish with wakefulness,
she tracks his city stones of night.
Dragging the streets wailing
awake the strike of her heart.

In a distinct body, an ambulance of grief.

Sometimes Banks reveals that these griefs and losses abruptly let go, after so much pain. In "Snow Angel," a short pair of stanzas perfectly tuned, she says of making those arm/leg swirls in the white landscape, "I think of you sometimes / as I make them. / I'm faring quite well." And the hidden "farewell" in the verse has lost its freight of loss and teases us instead with recovery.

When Banks dips into "God" and "god," her taste for whimsy keeps the quest light-hearted and vivid. She declares in "Stillness Like This,"

I am a hymn of birds released,
clench-free hands of flickering
flight; the very sweetest note.

And rolling through a tumble with a young man, she brings the poem back to the "thrill of possibility. / God's fierce whimsy / explodes in the air above us."

The most powerful poem in the 30-page collection is the title piece, "All of Me," salted with lines from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which the nymph Daphne, daughter of the river, has "closets weeping with clothes / never worn," and the body can sicken with envy, revenge, shame, craving. To fly into love has its costs, but who wants to be turned into a tree instead, rooted, unable to fly again? Banks says, "It's a spontaneous belief in sadness: / the charred life we live." There's the phrase that haunts me, that charred, rather than charmed, life -- the constant effort to confront the ashes, recall the glory of the fire, and say it was worth the burning.

It's rare that the delights and costs of passion are spelled out as vividly as they are in this collection. In one of the last pieces, "It Was Nothing," reminding me of the snapping string in performances of "The Cherry Orchard," Banks demonstrates that our losses have as much meaning as our loves: "like the garden of Eden after the gate had closed."