It’s refreshing to see a woman writing so freely and openly about love and about the physical body during romances. The Turquoise Bee is full of flowers and night-dancing, of time and loss and being enriched by experience. I cherish these poems. Stenson’s eye and concern of the intimate other is to be admired.

—Carl Adamshick, 2010 Winner of the Walt Whitman Award and 2012 Winner of the Oregon Book Award

Leah Stenson’s The Turquoise Bee is an autobiography of love, of individual loves. Fashioned from a sequence of poems, it spans decades and oceans. Here, a reader finds

Love requited and unrequited, trysts imagined and enacted. In turns lusty and witty and delicate, these poems offer themselves as “…fiery fruit/ hanging on a stark black branch/ …ready for harvest.”

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate