The Heaven Sent Leaf

My friend Katy Lederer is keeping a blog while she gives readings across the country of her new book of poetry, The Heaven Sent Leaf.

Here's what she's writing about:

"Hi there, I am blogging about my cross-country road-trip/book tour on behalf of The Heaven-Sent Leaf, a new book of poems about, er, money. The title is taken from the second part of Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles has discovered a way to make gold—what alchemists had been seeking to discover for centuries—by printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”). Once Mephistopheles has printed this imaginative money, thereby releasing an impecunious emperor from debt, what we would now term an economic “bubble” ensues; viands, wine, and labor are purchased with nothing so substantial as delusion and credulity. By the end of the story, the proverbial bubble has burst, and the emperor has fallen into ruin. Destinations on the tour include: Austin, Tallahassee, Ithaca, Las Vegas, Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco, Sonoma, Portland, Missoula, Boise, Denver, Lawrence, Iowa City, Lincoln, Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Chicago, New York, Providence, Hudson, Buffalo, Northampton, Athens, Atlanta, and Richmond."