Lederer's debut poetry collection explores sex, gender, nature and romance with lyric grace and intellectual rigor. These open and inventive poems are filled with "a kinetic energy that rises out of erotic desire"—D. A. Powell.

In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers , Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is "the self"? What is "the other"? And how to reproduce "one's self"? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body--or poem--malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body--or poem--attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral "we," the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world. In a post-Roe landscape, the poems complicate and ultimately refashion our pre-conceived notions of the self--and of life. Radical, uncanny, and stunningly original, The Engineers takes us on a journey to a place we've never been, but that is hauntingly familiar.

What do poets know of money? What do poets know of capital? Katy Lederer asks and answers such questions in "A Nietzschean Revival" and throughout her new collection of poetry, "The Heaven-Sent Leaf". And why not the poet, perhaps the best stockbroker of all in tendering the crumpled and transparent leaves of the spirit, exhibited here as expert in capital. Life is, after all, all about transaction, barter, the give and take between human beings, or between oneself and oneself--the hardest bargain of all. Katy Lederer, poet and author, is also "Brainworker" [poem excerpt follows] "To learn to keep distance. To learn to keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal mind. Along the dark edge of this reason. Along the dark edge of this mind?s little prison, inside of its bars now a silky white cat. Howling. Crawling in its little cage. Inside of its cage is the bright light of morning. Inside of its cage is the light of disease. To learn to be an animal. To learn to be that primal. To know who will slip you the fresh dish of milk. To long for your manager?s written approval. So soon am I up for my year-end review? The moon above settles into its shadow. I am howling at you."