Leah Flax Barber
The Mirror of Simple Souls
$20.00 | May 2025 | ISBN 978-1-959708-14-8
In her first book of poems, Leah Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell’arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject.
Taking its title from Marguerite Porete’s fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber’s stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: “Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century.”
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“Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung as we discover ‘The demonic finalist / Of material culture / Is love / There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman.’ There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform ‘The wounded chance / To think in public.’ This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away.”
—Peter Gizzi
The spare poems of The Mirror of Simple Souls evoke and then draw back into shimmer. Herein, a performance that suffuses the horizon with beautiful absurdity: a shirt sewn with mirrors that reflect a strange and evanescing world-at-large, “an I where the nay was.” Drawing from film, mystical texts, commedia dell’arte, the reader finds that there “is paraphernalia of life / all over.” This paraphernalia is a kind of “segue music” for the endlessly indeterminate. The old adage claims that we can’t step into the same river twice, but Leah Flax Barber creates an evocative, provocative current through which each step is at once past, present, and future.
—Elizabeth Robinson
Towards the end of Leah Flax Barber’s debut collection, Karl Kraus, the Austrian thinker, is summoned—“Origin is the goal”— in a call for the beginning to begin, again. A beginning that can only be located in the end. Flax Barber’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, a series of repeated beginnings and endings, is a form of speech act which, through a Freudian Durcharbeiten, or working through, brings about a new beginning. And, in its movement from this Freudian “working through” to a Hegelian Aufhebung, lets us begin, again, at the beginning, at the end. Each poem reflecting each other poem, each repetition mirroring each other repetition, as Flax Barber writes in the poem that mirrors the collection’s title, “I looked at the round mirror / Affixed to the tree / The round mirror / Affixed to the tree / Reminded me / Of The Mirror of Simple Souls.”
—Cynthia Cruz
Leah Flax Barber’s Mirror of Simple Souls reads like a journey, a kind of anabasis, passing back through the myth and history which are its own antecedents. It manifests, in the encounter, a saturnalian world: ludic, dark and sensuous, strange and vibrant with thought. I was delighted to travel with it.
—Claire DeVoogd
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Leah Flax Barber is a writer from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Cleveland Review of Books, The Common, Peach Mag, and Reading in Translation. The Mirror of Simple Souls is her first book.