'Sweetgum & Lightning,' Debut Poetry Collection by Alumnus Rodney Terich Leonard '18 Coming Soon

Sweetgum & Lighting, a debut poetry collection by Alumnus Rodney Terich Leonard '18, will be released on February 15, 2021 by Four Way Books. 

Leonard's work, which is particularly preoccupied with community, art, sexuality, and the function of language, explores a linguistic and sensual landscape where connotations cause words to take on new meanings. 

Adjunct Assistant Professor Mark Bibbins praised the collection, calling it "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...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.”

Poet A. Van Jordan, author of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award winning collection Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), said of 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.’”
 

Read a poem from Sweetgum & Lightning below: 
 

“Lunch Menu: Summer 1977”

Spam
ribbon cane
popcorn & hot sauce
cucumbers & dill pickles
side-of-the-road picked plums
knife-sliced fried potatoes
boiled peanuts
mayonnaise & ketchup sandwiches
white rice w/ salt, pepper & butter
Vienna Sausage & Saltine crackers
frozen sugar-sweetened white milk
baked store-stolen yams
 

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. Sweetgum & Lightning is his debut collection of poetry. 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.