In Leaving the Burdened Ground, Ava C. Cipri conjures worlds that remove us from the unbearable present. Hers is a complex vision where we can leave the day’s weight for something better: the body of a woman, the body in dance, the bulimic body, the shifting unconscious. With a knife-sharp voice, she braves the heart of resistance: “all I ever wanted was my blue back (sky  river  night)” A fierce and loving book.
—Jan Beatty, author of Jackknife  
 

I read this entire collection pushing back against the opening four words of Ava C. Cipri’s latest chapbook Leaving the Burdened Ground: “I can’t be trusted.” I do trust this speaker. I believe in her methods of understanding and recounting memories, whether by placing an ear to warm crabgrass or to a conch shell, or by developing photographs or by “redrafting the world” in poems. I see this speaker in her marked body: her severe ponytail and missing molars, even the ghostly scratches from a dance instructor’s claws on her upper thigh. I listen to her prayers to the ballet pointe shoes: no breasts, no period. I see her shopping in the Gap men’s department. I imagine her drag king show. The trust comes from the poet’s ability to be vulnerable. Cipri has created an honesty that permeates the pages. Her truth is written and the world is splitting open.
—Jennifer Jackson Berry, author of The Feeder