Another Land of My Body, a new poetry collection by Writing alumnus Rodney Terich Leonard ’18, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2024.
Reminiscent of work by Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Federico García Lorca, and Gwendolyn Brooks, the poems in Leonard’s second collection make the delicate leap between understanding and awe. These poems span topics from desire, aging, Black southern identity, and the inequitable socioeconomic burdens caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Using sonic patterning, Leonard also pays homage to victims of police brutality. Many of the figures of his poetry are emblems, illustrating what is invaluable outside the global constraints of capitalism.
“Another Land of My Body bucks embarrassment and regret," said Leonard. "The collection whets the spirit for decadence and pleasure reminding us that Earth is the wrong planet on which to find oneself poor and without rituals and ambitions.”
“Rodney Terich Leonard’s Another Land of My Body is a book that you need to read immediately,” says Writing professor Dorothea Lasky. “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.”
“An archive of a recording self, Rodney Terich Leonard’s Another Land of My Body operates the pulse and method for expansion,” writes Writing alumnus and poet Ricardo Alberto Maldonado ’08. “The eye pivots after being seen, after being adjudicated, reclaiming the work of judgment, sorting it out, seeing music in a wake. ‘Sound is a sorority,’ [Leonard] 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.”
Another Land of My Body is available for preorder here.
Rodney Terich Leonard currently lives in Manhattan. In addition to Columbia School of the Arts, he has received degrees from Columbia Teachers College, NYU Tisch, and The New School. His first poetry collection Sweetgum and Lightning (Four Way Books, 2021) won the NCPA Gold and Human Relations Indie Book Awards as well as being a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award and a semi-finalist for The Poetry Society of Virginia Poetry Book Award.
