“. . .  Leonard’s impeccable ear subverts legacy, using the musicality of lyric and the sonic patterning of form to remember neighbors alongside martyrs of the police state: “Heels cold cold-heeled history heels claimed cold: / Ahmaud Arbery-George Floyd-Rayshard Brooks.” In these pages, every figure is totemic, reiterating the invaluable outside the ceaseless binds of global capitalism. Leonard writes, “She wears her own hair & Fashion Fair. / Stutter ignores her penchant / For fried whiting & hushpuppies. / No one I know calls her baby.” “Here is a woman as monument,” he says. “My mother’s allure wasn’t from a magazine; / Jet came later.” In his own style, Leonard, too, is truly original, always encountering new terrain as he brings the past along. His poems are oft dispatches from “an abrupt ravine,” where “[he] learned another land of [his] body.” They are also lifelines, brief housecalls, promises of reunion amid temporary goodbyes. “I’m at my retrospective,” he answers the phone. “Let me call you back.””

– from the publisher