Keith Leonard

Still, the Shore Keith Leonard

Poetry. Here is a voice that contends with the sea. The sea of loss and ruin and wrack crashes against every one of these poems and still we hear something of beauty and value and surprise. The sail of something fine cracks on every page and it pulls us along. Here is a valiant and gorgeous book.--Steve Scafidi

What does landscape mean for Keith Leonard's STILL, THE SHORE? Trouble and song. Trouble for song, rather, as the sea exacts its cost for every 'huddle of shocked mouths' and 'hundred jagged backs slumping to shore' the poet pulls out of it. Lyricism isn't offered up as an answer here; it's part of a movement, of making and questioning what's been made. 'I am trying to get this right, ' Leonard writes, and we can hear it in every line.--Samuel Amadon

STILL, THE SHORE is a collection of the seen and the unseen, of what can be held and what must be let go in a world that takes and remakes us at its whim. Leonard's finely crafted, intricate images--'the riptide/will fold you down;/a steeple will peek/like a bud/from your back'--are countered by speaker's urgency. These poems are brave in their honesty, vulnerability and violence. They cut. They scrape. And they are more beautiful for doing so.-- Leah Nielsen