Sweetgum & Lightning

Rodney Terich Leonard

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781945588860
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Language beside the language
• Norphenia’s Lament
• Note from Norphenia: Everything’s Out in the Open
• Lunch Menu: Summer 1977
• Pie and Pap Marbury’s Daughter
• Hula Hoop Children
• Pink Chenille
• XI
• Manners Tilt Country
• Hummer of Anyone Decisive: 1915-1990
• The Late Mrs. Clarence Jackson, Sr. Speaks to Her Grandson in a Dream on a Ferry from Dover to Calais
• Fastened to Roots, Love and Story: Mother Recalls a Ten-Pound Storm
• Domesticoustics
• Lord, Have Mercy: Don’t Go to Hell Cramped Up
• Bumble o’ Names
• After Ben Webster’s 1959 Rendition of “Time After Time”
• Tanqueray #3
• To a Cousin on His Forty-Sixth
• Hot Metal Cools Slowly into Law
• Response to Miss Eady’s Every-Sunday Question, “How are you?”
• Elegy for Sabena
• Military Sexual Trauma: (MST) Per the Department of Veterans Affairs
• Bird Alone
• Day Dream
• 2 June 2001: Before What Happened, Miss Simone?
• Septembers Ago: America Behaving
• Without You, Very Well
• Cedarwood and Taurean Cuss
• Carnal in a Time of PrEP
• Complexion
• Heave
• Wind-Blown Plums
• My Father Liked Me and Loved My Mother: The Last Tension and Say-so with Scent
• Kamasi, Muscadet, and Mary Lou Williams
• Identified by Fingerprint
• Brand-New Sheets
• What can I do with this feeling?
• Sheep Headed to a Bad Market
• Oaken in the Midst: Bleak Update to Mr. Baldwin
• Aphorism
• “Think”: after Curtis Mayfield
• The Music That Learns Us
• At Le Diplomate
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author