Eight Songs of [Mothering] & [Capacity] delves into the demanding journey of raising children as a single mother in a society calibrated for two-parent families, where to be a single mother is seeded with stigma and shame. This collection revisits that marginal experience, decisions made in extremis, grappling with the challenges of premature adulthood, intertwined with intergenerational trauma. It is a call to the social condition that undervalues the profound role of mothering. The poems articulate the shame which became a process of unmothering, leading to states of hyper-productivity, and distracted and disturbed mothering, to justify the validity of being. The poems are apologies, lamentations, a cataloguing of survival and endurance.

The girl in the sequence is diseased and stigmatised, locked away in the house. Siblings perform diagnostic ceremonies and make home-made treatments using potions from the natural world. With a sense of thwarted belongingness, the house girl is simultaneously complicit and disobedient. While grieving for a particular loss of bodily autonomy, she offers the reader a glimpse into the complex and troubling psychic processes that accompany chronic illness.

Bettbehandlung is a feminist re-visioning of historical and medical treatments of ‘hysterical’ female subjects and performative spaces of illness. It focuses on historical acts of diagnosis and the shifting of bodily propriety, alongside issues of dependency and witnessing.

Focusing on the traumatized, dysfunctional body, the writing is imbued with medical discourses and clashing registers that echo the disfluency of the body and mind. The writing is both detached and emotionally charged, confessional in the sense that it reports on the clinical encounter and attempts to fathom what it means to live in the world as a chronically sick person.

Places of Articulation is a sequence of poems that borrows phrases, fragments and diagnoses from the historical, anatomical and neurological theories of speech disorders

Experimental and exploratory - part daybook, and part astronomical chart, this is a voyage into both the self, the body and the personal as well as into an ever-expanding cosmos of stars, planets and space.

The poems of Ephemeris are fiercely bright and tuned in on a precise, musical wavelength of sound and form. Language, seen here through this particular telescope, is exuberant and numerous with possibilities, gracefully testing its own boundaries. In galaxies of sounds and shapes, Lehane brilliantly takes a giant lyric leap from poem to poem, making for something of a stellar debut.