Steven Leyva, associate professor in The University of Baltimore's MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts, has released a new collection of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty. Published by Blair, the book is receiving critical praise for its blending of modern and ancient cultural touch points into a highly relatable work about acceptance and resilience.
Leyva and fellow poet Dora Malech will appear together at The University of Baltimore on Thursday, March 13 at 7 p.m. in the Wright Theater, located on the fifth floor of The University of Baltimore Student Center, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave. The event is free and open to the public.
A native of New Orleans who was raised in Houston, Leyva earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from UBalt before returning to teach in the program. a nationally acclaimed writer whose poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and The Understudy's Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House.
"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," says Valzhyna Mort, the Belarus born poet. "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."
As its publisher describes it, The Opposite of Cruelty "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.'"
Poet Jericho Brown says, "Steven Leyva's The Opposite of Cruelty reads like a series of odes and vignettes praising the very fact of daily Black life. Each poem is careful to move that which is mundane to a position of praise from the right amount of salt necessary for making grits to worms who 'perform their transubstantiation/through the fragile dark.' Witty, ambitious, and formally inventive, The Opposite of Cruelty is a beautiful book."
Learn more about Prof. Steven Leyva and The University of Baltimore's MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.
The following is a Q&A with Leyva marking the occasion of the publishing of his new
book, The Opposite of Cruelty:
Question: Your work is consistently rich with sensory detail—there's a pop in even
your shorter poems that pulls at the ear. It's musical, but saying that seems to undersell
what you're doing. How do you think about nouns, descriptors, etc., in constructing
a poem? Is "constructing" a relevant term?
Steven Leyva: To mention the euphony (musicality) is important and part of poetry's appeal that is distinct from other literary forms. Aural and oral traditions are always near the heart of all poems no matter the style or content. Regarding the various parts of speech when crafting a poem, I do lean on the specificity of nouns and verbs to move things towards a vibrant, sensory experience, but more than anything else I am trying to be as playful and insightful as possible. This often means compressing the language a bit to make the aural experience amplify, while also being attentive to the superfluous in syntax.
Q: As your new collection came together, what stood out to you as foundational to the work? Or, maybe a better way to ask: What's the moment in this collection that you want the reader to experience?
Leyva: The central question that the book wrestles with is, "What is the opposite of cruelty?" I think the book wants readers to move beyond pat answers such as compassion, into the more nuanced, more communal answers we might find together. The book does offer an answer, I believe, but you'll have to read it to see what it suggests.
Q: What's your favorite way for folks to get to know your work? Does a live audience hearing you read resonate differently for you, compared to the knowledge that your work is being read and appreciated? How important is it to receive that response, in whatever form it takes?
Leyva: I want audiences to have multiple experiences and multiple pleasures with the poems. Hearing a poet read aloud is vibrant act of faith in the arts, and a generous commitment to being with others. Read a poem on the page, in the quiet solitude of one's own home, is another kind of pleasure, and reminds us to slow down, think deeply, and feel the textures of our humanity. The heartbeat in the human. The song in the syntax. The beauty that connects us all. If we can approach that both collectively and individually then I am grateful for whichever way readers and audiences have encountered the work.