Susan Lefler’s new collection of poems, Rendering the Bones, has a way of getting under your skin.

by Joanne O’Sullivan . photo by Dan Bennett

You can just picture Aunt Bess. She’s a hot mess. Three miles of bad road. In her poem Bess, Brevard poet Susan Lefler doesn’t exactly say that. She says: “Aunt Bess wore no underwear beneath her feedsack dress.” Your imagination can do the rest. Her goal as a poet is “bringing the reader into the image,” Lefler says. Conjuring up images and moments that are both comforting and disturbing is what she seems to do best, and her first book of poetry, Rendering the Bones (Wind Publications), was published this spring.

Aunt Bess is just one character in Lefler’s tightly knit collection, which hums with keen observations. A former managing editor of Smoky Mountain Living magazine, Lefler is a longtime student of current and former North Carolina poet laureates Cathy Smith Bowers and Kathryn Stripling Byer, both of whom helped her complete the collection. The book has a distinctly Southern accent, wise and insightful, with a hint of sass. And she doesn’t just stick to the South. An earthquake in India, Gregor Mendel’s DNA experiments and Einstein make their way into her poems.

Lefler, a mother of four and grandmother to eight, grew up in Chapel Hill, but she has deep roots in Rockingham County’s tobacco fields. She takes the reader there with her poems about eccentric, menacing relatives like Bess, but also connects that haunting past with its vulnerable present. “This used to be the land nobody wanted,” Lefler writes. “Where slackjawed barns lean heavy on the elbows of old hills.”

Susan Lefler will read from Rendering the Bones on July 8 at 7pm with Kathryn Stripling Byer at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. She reads on August 7 at 3pm at Malaprop’s Cafe & Bookstore in Asheville.