Inspired by the hit-series Mad Men, Leah Umansky, has created a wonderful selection of poems which explore themes of love, lust, betrayal, and ambiguity in her second poetry collection, Don Dreams and I Dream.  Leah debuted some of the poems from Don Dreams and I Dream at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop A Night at the Victrola Reading in Seattle!  Leah Umansky contributing writer to Tin House,  Luna Luna Magazine, BOMB Magazine’s BOMBLOG , and The Rumpus, and curator of The Couplet Reading series in New York.

Don Dreams and I Dream is compulsively readable, but it is far from a light collection of poems. Most hold the weight of women’s struggles for recognition as human beings over much of the past century. The poems are at once political and confessional, feisty and giddy, aggressive and playfully submissive. The poems are nothing if not sexy, and sensuality is key to their power—just as it is, in large part, the key to Don’s. -Amy Silbergeld