Personalized, Signed Copy of The Filling Station by Leesa Dean

A figure in an Elizabeth Bishop poem, a charming Brazilian man named Manuelzinho,“the worst gardener since Cain”, so piqued Leesa Dean’s interest that she mined words and images from Bishop’s body of work in order to create a larger world for him to occupy. The result is The Filling Station, a lyrical novella-in-verse drawn uniquely from Bishop’s lexicon in which Manuelzinho takes a wife (and a lover), has a daughter, and grieves his dying father. Shifting from rain-soaked villages to the barren, haunting landscape of Itabira, this novella is a compelling example of poetry’s extraordinary capacity for encapsulating human experiences love, time, memory and for reanimating those experiences in the reader’s imagination.

About the Author: Leesa Dean

Leesa Dean was born in Northern British Columbia and raised in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. She spent a decade in Montreal where she studied Creative Writing at Concordia University before moving to Toronto. She also lived on random farms and beaches before eventually settling in Nelson, BC. She is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program and now teaches English and Creative Writing for Selkirk College's University Arts and Sciences department. Her fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews have been published in The New Quarterly, Matrix, Lemon Hound, The Headlight Anthology, among others. She’s been a finalist for literary awards such as the Irving Layton Award, the Litpop Award, and the Quebec Writing Competition. She is a regular contributor to The New Quarterly and is the Interviews Editor for The Humber Literary Review. When she's not writing or teaching, she is almost certainly on a wild adventure somewhere, doing things like riding her bike across Canada or befriending circus bear trainers in the Deep South.

• Name : Leesa Dean