Overview

Steven Leyva'ssecond collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man's lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology. In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva's poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise ""the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come."" For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you'll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one's self represented in art and film. This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask ""What is the opposite of cruelty?"" The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man's hand touching another man's face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, ""not a season of phantasmal peace, but what's left / when the world's terrors retreat.""

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9781958888346

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"""Leyva's voice breaks through the surface of daily life to give us the depth of origin, place, history, and music. His second collection, remarkable for embracing lyricism, narrative, and political consciousness, is a homecoming into childhood, fatherhood, and one's responsibility to live kindly in the erratic world. Whether in Baltimore or in New Orleans, he draws his rhythms and metaphors from life's fleeting passages, wrestling with what it means to recognize and record their beauty. The book emphasizes Leyva's range—he is a poet of cities, of fleeting time, a love poet, a friend poet, a father poet, a community poet, which is to say, a historian of the American heart.""—Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected"

"""Leyva's voice breaks through the surface of daily life to give us the depth of origin, place, history, and music. His second collection, remarkable for embracing lyricism, narrative, and political consciousness, is a homecoming into childhood, fatherhood, and one's responsibility to live kindly in the erratic world. Whether in Baltimore or in New Orleans, he draws his rhythms and metaphors from life's fleeting passages, wrestling with what it means to recognize and record their beauty. The book emphasizes Leyva's range--he is a poet of cities, of fleeting time, a love poet, a friend poet, a father poet, a community poet, which is to say, a historian of the American heart.""--Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected"

"“Steven Leyva’s newest book, The Opposite of Cruelty, is full of lyrics that pack more music and thinking into one line than many poets pack into a whole poem. Here are expansive, tensile sonnets that explore the fragility and intensity of joy, that sing the praises of both ancient myth and popular culture, that meld the devotional to the political. Here are odes and aubades, here are poems that playfully reinvent poetic form in order to question the constructions (and restrictions) we’ve used to socially imagine race. This is a generous, beautiful collection that speaks directly about how and what we choose to love in this dazzling, changeable, sometimes frightening world.”—Paisley Rekdal, author of West: A Translation “These poems break the conventions of time and place to make a map of family here and on the other side of here. Leyva makes a map for a son, reminding him to ‘keep your heart.’ These poems ask, ‘What would the world be if it had you instead of your legacy?’ And in answer, we, the reader and the poet, make art, a life, a home. Reading The Opposite of Cruelty is like listening to a mix of Charles Mingus, Nina Simone, and Outkast while setting fire to the world's most famous maps.”—Tyree Daye, a little bump in the earth and Cardinal ""Leyva's voice breaks through the surface of daily life to give us the depth of origin, place, history, and music. His second collection, remarkable for embracing lyricism, narrative, and political consciousness, is a homecoming into childhood, fatherhood, and one's responsibility to live kindly in the erratic world. Whether in Baltimore or in New Orleans, he draws his rhythms and metaphors from life's fleeting passages, wrestling with what it means to recognize and record their beauty. The book emphasizes Leyva's range—he is a poet of cities, of fleeting time, a love poet, a friend poet, a father poet, a community poet, which is to say, a historian of the American heart.""—Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected"

Author Information

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans and raised in Houston, Texas. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of Low Parish (a chapbook) and the collection The Understudy's Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

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