Without Leave

Deborah Fleming is author of two previous collections of poems, Morning, Winter Solstice (2012) and Into a New Country (2016), as well as a chapbook, Migrations (2005), and a novel, Without Leave (2014), winner of the Asheville Award from Black Mountain Press. She has also published "A man who does not exist": The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge (1995), Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats's Influence on Robinson Jeffers (2015), W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (2000), and Learning the Trade: W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry (1992) as well as articles on Yeats, Jeffers, Eamon Grennan, and Aldo Leopold. Four of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Winner of a Vandewater Poetry Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Council of Learned Societies, she is director and editor of the Ashland Poetry Press. Currently she lives on a farm in northeast Ohio.

Without Leave chronicles the stories of two alienated young people during 1967-70-David, who goes AWOL from the Navy where he'd hoped to find training and focus for his life but finds only boredom and disillusionment during deployment on an aircraft carrier and an artist, Diane, who drops out of college after a brutal rape and the death of the black man she loved-who meet and fall in love in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco in 1967 only to find they cannot escape their past: David cannot be free while a fugitive and Diane cannot be free in a segregated society at war with itself.