# Before You

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![Before You](https://quivercdn.com/covers/dedalus/leeanne-quinn/before-you_978-19-0661-448-5-fa1adfeb.webp?v=2026-11-10%2002%3A26%3A37)

- Authors: [Leeanne Quinn](https://www.bookquiver.com/leeanne-quinn)
- Language: en_US

## Description

Loss and memory. The poems of the first section of Irish poet Leeanne Quinn's debut collection explore the intimacies of a sibling relationship, and revisit it from a distance travelled since, where new experience is " the earth's irreproachable / response to your absence". Other poems intersperse this main narrative, inspired by a variety of subjects, from Gertrude Stein to the Drogheda-born artist Nano Reid, natural disasters to the complex territory of broken relationships. Pain is evoked, sensed never far from the surface, but the telling remains oblique, the particulars refusing a simple summary or conclusion. Life goes on, in what one of the poems in the second section calls " this awful business of living", a variant on a phrase by Elizabeth Bishop whose letters, in counterpoint to the book's first section, prompt and provide an external departure point and reference.

## Editions

### Before You

- Publisher: Dedalus
- ISBN: 978-19-0661-448-5
- Pages: 80
- Language: en_US