This is a demanding, rewarding, refreshingly iconoclastic and earthy collection of poems for the way we live now.
John Field, Poor Rude Lines

A searching and resourceful imagination is at work here, seeking new perspectives with vitality and insight.
Penelope Shuttle

Leal [is] playful, experimental, questioning of 'poetry' as a specialised, rarefied state enjoyed only by sensitive types, her poems with a touch of theatre and bravura.
George Szirtes

These poems are an alternative news broadcast from a young American correspondent abroad in the world. Contained within them are many of the domestic and emotional snippets which CNN will never give you.
Martin Newell .

The poems turn familiar tropes and warp them into new, peculiar shapes; the one-night stand becomes a defiant one, stories of her grandfather take a hallucinatory turn. Stephanie Leal’s world is one where preconceived ideas unravel suddenly, leaving a strange and unfamiliar territory behind them. [...] She is neither militant nor fawning – a struck bell that demonstrates a romantic but pragmatic spirit.
Andrew Spragg, Mad Dog