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Sweetgum & Lightning

Sweetgum & Lightning

Current price: $17.80
Publication Date: February 15th, 2021
Publisher:
Four Way Books
ISBN:
9781945588747
Pages:
104

Description

An intersection of jazz and the written word: poems to be experienced and felt

Sweetgum & Lightning lets us into an extraordinary poetic universe, shaped by a vernacular rooted in the language of self, one’s origins, and music. In poems that are deeply sensual in nature, Rodney Terich Leonard considers gender and sexuality, art, poverty, and community. Imagery expands through unexpected lexical associations and rumination on the function of language; words take on new meaning and specificity, and the music of language becomes tantamount to the denotations of words themselves. Through extensive webs of connotation, Leonard’s narratives achieve a sense of accuracy and intimacy. The nuanced lens of these poems is indicative of the honesty of expression at work in the collection—one that affirms the essentiality of perception to living and memory.

About the Author

Rodney Terich Leonard was born in Nixburg, Alabama. An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Indolent Books-What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.

Praise for Sweetgum & Lightning

“With the vernacular of Zora Neale Hurston and the music of Leontyne Price, Rodney Terich Leonard honors the past while addressing the present moment in Sweetgum & Lightning. Take your time taking these poems in; they’re meant to be sung aloud. As you listen, what you’ll hear is what happens when the spirit is captured on the page. When the news of the day is too much to bear and we can’t find the words, be grateful for this poet, who arrives when, ‘We need somebody to sing us, at least, a song.’”
—A. Van Jordan

“Rodney 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

Featured in Lambda Literary's "February’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books"
— Sydney Heidenberg

Featured in Library Journal‘s “Books and Authors To Know: Poetry Titles To Watch 2021”
— Barbara Hoffert

“Sweetgum & Lightning lets us into an extraordinary poetic universe, shaped by a vernacular rooted in the language of self, one’s origins, and music. In poems that are deeply sensual in nature, Rodney Terich Leonard considers gender and sexuality, art, poverty, and community. Imagery expands through unexpected lexical associations and rumination on the function of language; words take on new meaning and specificity, and the music of language becomes tantamount to the denotations of words themselves.” –Chelsea Risley, Southern Review of Books
— Chelsea Risley