Rodney Terich Leonard’s Sweetgum & Lightning is a cascade of image and song, charged by a voice that can pivot from reverence to gleeful vulgarity inside a single line. In these elegies, flashbacks, odes, indictments, riffs, and adorations we find a self engaged in constant revision yet remaining steady: ‘I just wanna be jumpseat & aero in my own // historical zoom.’ As much as this book looks to the past, there’s no coasting on nostalgia here. ‘The past / creeps wild / in my eyes,’ and memory ‘lurks & it forgives,’ but Leonard is no lurker; even when he seems to be observing from somewhere off to the side, he’s at the center of the action. He stacks his lines with the accoutrements of queer desire, a gesture of both affirmation and subversion—in other words, a show of strength. Sweetgum & Lightning isn’t just good poetry, it’s good company too.

Mark Bibbins