“Leslie’s dark tones are reminiscent of Rebecca Brown, but she is a creative force all her own. Her star is rising. Watch for her.”–Hiromi Goto”Alex Leslie conducts artful traffic in the zeitgeist, stories that are earthy, smoky, with Didion’s terse calm, empathetic and reliable as duct tape.”–Mark Anthony Jarman”A text of ‘leakage,’ a ‘softwall luminesence’ that produces and diminishes its own light. Deep in the ‘bloodclick,’ Alex Leslie’s gorgeous chapbook bonds design materials, transit routes and sky/ocean notes to create both an ‘impression of…thoughts’ and a progressive,’wavering’ grid of feeling. Narrative hurts then stops. Gatetheory. Then expresses: ‘when you let it go.’ Loved this. Loved what was brought to bear upon: a Westward edge.”–Bhanu Kapil (The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University) on the chapbook 20 Objects for the New World (Nomados, 2011)
– Praise for previous works

“To hear everything available for the hearing is still to misperceive, but to enter the condensation is to enter an entirely different world. In Alex Leslie’s brilliant new collection, The things I heard about you, melodies seem to repeat everywhere, with the slightest of variations. What is easily fixed becomes easily refused. The most succinct articulation may be the most beautiful, but what it captures of the original utterance is the palest, most ghostly glimpse of the original, and often its opposite.”–Larissa Lai
“Prose poems, soundtracks, minifictions–the lyrical, multi-faceted pieces in The things I heard about you record the ways in which language makes and unmakes us. ‘Between a tooth and safety,’ bodies, weathers, genders inhabit and are inhabited by histories of loss, institutions of violence. These stories don’t shrink even as they grow smaller; each is distilled to a potent drop that sinks into the mind like ink into skin: ‘I, not here, write.'” –Jen Currin