ESH Leighton
Author. Poet. Observer.
ESH Leighton’s debut collection: Backwards Births isn’t just an assemblage of poetry. It’s a tribute to the arc of life, from death ever backward toward womb.
Separated into four distinct parts, Backwards Births examines the discovery of beauty in death, grief, and aging. What it is to be a woman, married but childless. The evolution from young adult to actualized self. And the dichotomy of the old soul—to be at once young and old in a world where there is space for neither.
Simultaneously longing for connection and thirsty for social distance, Backwards Births illustrates the ambivert’s plight with stunning imagery and fierce intent.
ESH Leighton
Novelist and poet ESH Leighton grew up on the West Coast but found her voice when she lived in Brooklyn. She has lived in seven different cities in the last dozen years, a fact she blames on her mother having played Ramblin' Man by the Allman Brothers Band too many times in her youth.
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In both what she reads as well as what she writes, she favors genre-benders: the speculative with the spooky, the fantastic with the macabre. Her prose is lyrical, and her poems tell stories.
Usually found with a book in hand or listening to podcasts about history or filmmaking, ESH spends most her free time not devoted to the craft doting on her animals, experimenting with abstract painting, or attempting to run farther than five miles. ESH currently lives in Texas with her musician husband, a pack German shepherd mutts, and a single black cat.
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Her first collection of poems, Backwards Births, is available now.
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