Leopoldine Core is the author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the story collection When Watched, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb, The American Poetry Review, Apology Magazine, PEN America and The Best American Short Stories, among others.
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When WatchedStoriesFrom"Memory"
She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.
When Watched:Stories -
When WatchedStoriesFrom"Historic Tree Nurseries"
They dropped their bags off and went across the street to Outback Steakhouse. Peanut ordered a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits. Frances ordered a full steak dinner. She had always been able to eat heartily under stress and Peanut found this unattractive, too warlike.
Peanut slouched, letting her long brown hair fall over one eye. Lewd tawny light lit the exposed half of her face. “So you’re not going to talk to me?” she asked, pissed to be the first to speak.
“You aren’t saying anything either,” Frances said impassively.
“Well, I don’t know what to say to you when you act like this.”
“What, like mean?”
“More like heartless. Like a piece of statuary.” Peanut stared at Frances. “It’s like you’re autistic.”
Frances smiled like a wolf. “Do you know what that means? To be autistic?”
“Of course I do. Don’t quiz me.”
“Just tell me what you think it means.”
“It means someone who can, you know, rattle off all the prime numbers, but not, like, say hello.”
Frances chewed her steak and swallowed. “I’m like that?”
“Yeah.”
Frances was surprised by how much this hurt her feelings. She continued to eat and wanted to cry.
When Watched:Stories -
When WatchedStoriesFrom"Teenage Hate"
“You can’t just come in here.” Cindy sat on the floor next to an open magazine.
“I loved to read when I was your age,” Joan said. “But my brother was always stealing my books.” She smiled reflectively. “He didn’t even read them. He just put them on his shelf. What he wanted was my enthusiasm.”
“Mom, get out.”
“I believe this is my book.”
“It was on the shelf.”
“You can have it.” Joan set the book back down on the bed. “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said, but there came no reply. Cindy sat with her arms crossed, a homicidal song in her eyes. Still Joan was too captivated to look away. It was a marvelous view of something utterly gone: her youth.
She set the book back down on the bed and left the room, leaving the door ajar. Then Cindy slammed it.
When Watched:Stories
“The poems in Leopoldine Core’s Veronica Bench . . . move in the associative loops and discursive rhythms of conversations, voicemails, and irreligious prayers . . . As readers, we are confidants and onlookers by turns. We follow Core down trompe l’oeil tunnels just to skin our knees on painted walls.” —Maggie Millner, Fanzine
“In Veronica Bench Core exposes us, out-greeds us, jokes freely with us and speaks better than us. You should be bathing with these poems, you should rub up against them, you should examine your own monstrosity more, you should dote on your pain, you should be ashamed you ever were ashamed of being meat, you should let others record your girlhood, your infancy, your fullness, you should stop trying to be a better person before you die, you should read this book until it's memorized and then we can all be blissed out in its captivity.” —Jenny Zhang
Leopoldine Core’s work announces a prodigious talent. It is deeply mature, characterized not merely by writerly skill, but also wisdom, empathy, and a specificity of human observation. So much of what she is able to detect and depict about human desire rides on the most minute yet pitch perfect of gestures. There is a powerful understatement to these stories, though the emotional register, and the stakes, are always high. The heart is ignited, kicked into gear by Core’s dialogue, and by the audible silences running through this work. She is a master of closure.