OBVIOUSLY I LOVE YOU BUT IF I WERE A BIRD
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PATRICK O'LEARY
Readers of Patrick O’Leary’s poetic science fiction and fantasy (The Gift, Door Number Three, The Impossible Bird, 51) will recognize the peculiar candor and humor and insight he brings to his first love, poetry.
Selected from poems written over the course of 50 years, Obviously I love you but if I were a bird displays the gifts of a writer, as Gene Wolfe described him, “so damned human it’s a wonder man-eating sharks haven’t come onshore to get him."
- April 2025 978-1-958880-37-1
- small paperback, 4 x 7
- Preorder copies below. or order ebook and trade paper print copies from these dealers. (More coming.)
Readers of Patrick O’Leary’s poetic science fiction and fantasy (The Gift, Door Number Three, The Impossible Bird, 51) will recognize the peculiar candor and humor and insight he brings to his first love, poetry.
Selected from poems written over the course of 50 years, Obviously I love you but if I were a bird displays the gifts of a writer, as Gene Wolfe described him, “so damned human it’s a wonder man-eating sharks haven’t come onshore to get him."
“Obviously I love you begins with an autobiography in sonnet form giving voice to existential questions as well as to intimately observed and felt moments of delight and grief. Outrage at injustice and tenderness for the vulnerable weave the sonnet sequence and the free verse into a coherent tapestry of human experience.”
— Anca Vlasopolos, author of Late Pearlescence and Fires in the Dark
"Patrick O’Leary’s new poetry collection, Obviously I love you but if I were a bird, sonnets and free verse, has all the strengths I came to love in his novels and stories — wonderful imagery, imagination, humor and depth."
— Jeffrey Ford, author of Ahab's Return and The Physiognomy
"In the pages of Obviously I love you but If I were a bird, we meet the many facets of Patrick O’Leary: proud patriarch, disappointed patriot, a man intent on relearning the stranger he meets in the mirror. Here is the sore tenderness of a poet at peak linguistic performance, contemplating his own mortality. Birth, divorce, children, devotion, books, memory, bitterness, beauty: his poems range abroad a spectrum of nuanced emotion and experience. O’Leary 'medicate[s] the darkness with [his] hope' and praises what lights it, while never neglecting to methodically and acerbically examine the monsters crouching there, both without and within.
— C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
“[O’Leary’s] voice is fresh and funny.”
— New York Times
“The most unorthodox, and unorthodoxly invigorating collection of the year. Potent, outspoken, unhinged.”
— Interzone on Other Voices, Other Doors
“Patrick O’Leary can be alternately funny and incredibly tragic, wise and light-hearted . . . Few authors offer such a wide range of images under a single cover.”
— Starlog
— Anca Vlasopolos, author of Late Pearlescence and Fires in the Dark
"Patrick O’Leary’s new poetry collection, Obviously I love you but if I were a bird, sonnets and free verse, has all the strengths I came to love in his novels and stories — wonderful imagery, imagination, humor and depth."
— Jeffrey Ford, author of Ahab's Return and The Physiognomy
"In the pages of Obviously I love you but If I were a bird, we meet the many facets of Patrick O’Leary: proud patriarch, disappointed patriot, a man intent on relearning the stranger he meets in the mirror. Here is the sore tenderness of a poet at peak linguistic performance, contemplating his own mortality. Birth, divorce, children, devotion, books, memory, bitterness, beauty: his poems range abroad a spectrum of nuanced emotion and experience. O’Leary 'medicate[s] the darkness with [his] hope' and praises what lights it, while never neglecting to methodically and acerbically examine the monsters crouching there, both without and within.
— C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
“[O’Leary’s] voice is fresh and funny.”
— New York Times
“The most unorthodox, and unorthodoxly invigorating collection of the year. Potent, outspoken, unhinged.”
— Interzone on Other Voices, Other Doors
“Patrick O’Leary can be alternately funny and incredibly tragic, wise and light-hearted . . . Few authors offer such a wide range of images under a single cover.”
— Starlog
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR