Small Pleasures

"These small pleasures of intelligent thoughtful, and thought-provoking poems will warm the reader's heart."

     -Sandra Costich

"An old song tells us that "Little things mean a lot," and rarely has this been as true as it is in Small Pleasures, Nikia Leopold's bittersweet engagements with a glorious and mortal world. The title poem describes "Pleasures with the heft of tinsel, / so small they're irreducible." Also irreducible are these sharply observed, precisely crafted poems that contain, and provoke, depths of feeling."

     -Michael Palma

"If you want to be moved, read these poems."

     -Julia Wendell

"Niki Leopold is an exquisite receiver-of sensory news, complex emotions, hints of meaning. Her poems are passionate, delicate, fierce, brave."

     -Mary Azrael

"The sparse, finely made poems in Niki Leopold's Small Pleasures possess the intricacy of snowflakes, each crystalline portrait revealing the wonder of existence encountered in an ordinary moment."

     -Pauline Uchmanowicz



Niki Leopold is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in Poetry, and has a Ph.D. in Art History, also from Hopkins. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Commonweal, Poetry East and Poetry. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Dark Feathers. Her children's book, Adam's Crayons, is out from Galileo Press. She lives with her husband in Ruxton, Maryland.