. . . singular poems, each a distinct marvel . . .

Arriving from Four Way Books, March 2024

 

Ephemeral yet tangible, bridging the delicate border between understanding and awe, Rodney Terich Leonard’s poems live in the world even as they leave it, clinging like “a ribbon in the sand / Captivated by your ankle,” that “Bojangles next to your chair.” Leonard’s sophomore collection, Another Land of My Body, collects singular poems, each a distinct marvel, even as together they witness aging, champion the resilience of desire, articulate Black Southern identity, memorialize the unequal burdens of the pandemic across racial and socioeconomic strata, and preserve the time capsule of one’s particular memories that will depart with them when they go. When “COVID pumped up on” Ms. Clematine and Ms. Bessie Will, who “paid taxes in an American town with six ICU beds,” “the heirloom chitlins / & pound cake recipes / & summer-white buckets of Budweiser / To B.B. King went hush.” 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.”

Poetry

Praise for Another Land of My Body

Rodney Terich Leonard’s Another Land of My Body is a book that you need to read immediately. Love poems exist here side-by-side with poems of mourning and possibility. Another Land of My Body is a book that–despite the world’s immense joys and terrors–will expand your heart and make you love poetry again and again. In a poetic landscape that is simultaneously both real and spiritual, Leonard sets up a portrait of life that is made possible by the power of mystical encounter and deeply felt experience. Leonard deftly marries the medicinal poetry of spell work and dreams with the all- encompassing power of language. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, and Federico García Lorca, Leonard sets up a vision of the world as it is, in the hopes that it can one day be everything good that it promises. As Leonard writes, “You’re a rock-/Sachet of neem./A tangible leaning post./Niche to weigh intuition./Grip for the gable.” What is rock in this book is also a poem is also a space for infinity and infinite love. Love and the imagination are ignited over and over again by Leonard’s searing and caring words. These are poems with “Pasture dreams of three-leaf clovers” and “Jet-black beehive mauve powder puff.” These are poems with “Warm- warm post-martini mouth;/Artful froth” and “Red Hots & oil sausage.” These are poems that live forever.

Dorothea Lasky

Curtis Mayfield. Luther Vandross. Little Richard. Cousin Twyla. Uncle Douglas. In his exciting sophomore collection, as though flipping through the thick, laminated pages of old photo albums, Rodney Terich Leonard examines secrecy, illness, loss, as well as the material conditions of Black people and their lived experiences. Formally inventive, incantatory, and deeply musical, Leonard’s poems sing of the fullness of cultural experience, which include the violence we are capable of inflicting upon one another and the violence inflicted upon Black communities by structural racism and the state. Witting and lively, these lyrics mourn, they celebrate, they charge us with the difficult task of remembering, of saying the names of our beloved.

Nathan McClain

An archive of a recording self, Rodney Terich Leonard’s Another Land of My Body operates the pulse and method for expansion. The eye pivots after being seen, after being adjudicated, reclaiming the work of judgement, sorting it out, seeing music in a wake. “Sound is a sorority,” he writes, holding the intent of poetic transformation at the language level, at the image, in the sound, amplifying the noise of a verb in a kind of verbing. “Each braid furthers us.” He furthers. He fashions from the world of surface, seeing and singing through surface, to find interiority, to record care through an ongoing pandemic, through the work of family. The book is furthering. Another Land of My Body vibrates and astonishes.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

Why should a poet tell us what we already know? Rodney Terich Leonard’s poems frequently address the hidden, the overlooked, and the neglected. They range from down South to men on the down-low, casting their inimitable light on desire and family, on abandon and abandonment. Like the writers of an earlier Harlem Renaissance, Leonard’s poetry celebrates urban life while maintaining a nourishing root in Black Southern communities and vernaculars. And like those earlier writers, his poems upset the perceptions of a broken and vicious nation: “Your language griot cum laude.” Always restless in place, Leonard’s gorgeous poetic portmanteau of postwar Black culture and history is made to travel widely.

Alan Gilbert

Another Land of My Body

An abrupt ravine.

I learned another land of my body.

Packaged trauma-

Eleven orchids refusing mist.

Maimed to the bone.

Texture of asphalt shingles;

He rocked a red cap backwards.

My pinkie strolled across corduroy.

Grown shame is shame groomed.

Here I can’t say what I sometimes crave.

Hunger is one of my songs.