LEEANNE QUINN was born in Drogheda in 1978. She has studied at University College Dublin, University College Cork, and holds a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her poems have been published in a variety of magazines and journals. She lives in Dublin.

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Loss and memory. The poems of the first section of Leeanne Quinn’s debut collection, Before You, 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”. 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.