Stacia Fleegal just can’t stop creating serious noise in her poems.  She’s a writer who isn’t afraid to make words crackle and snap, especially about how social class works in America, starting at the bottom and going up.  So, fair to say, you should expect something other than the tame lyric in this collection. Poetry this political often makes people nervous and want to look away.  Better that we had many more nervous readers and much more poetry as honest, direct, and inventive as what is found here in Versus.

-Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho and founder and editor of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press

Grounded in our contemporary culture, where wealth and power are being redefined, Fleegal’s poems express the anger of a generation disenfranchised by its presumed privilege. She unceremoniously exposes an america that has lost its status as a proper noun, and she argues for the right to “love with a capital V.” These are statements of protest, cries for solidarity—but cannot be mistaken for slogans. Each poem is a sharp-edged gem crafted into a collection that is in dialogue with itself and with the reader: where “I don’t” follows “I do” and “she can’t” leads to “you can.”  

-Ren Powell, author of Mercy Island, founding editor of Babel Fruit and Protest Poems.org, and associate editor of Poemeleon