Cover Art: Amy Friend, Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 40 pages, 6" X 6.5"
October 2013, ISBN 978-1-936919-23-9
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PATIENCE
A hundred or so lobster pots cut loose
and chock full of dead catch. Broken jaw
of a pier. Summers I learned
what once was buried just as easily
might surface: car keys, caulking gun,
whale rib the size of a park bench.
Boys rode their boats like bulls. Were bucked
and washed ashore with half the throttle fast beneath
the foam white knuckles of their fists.
Salt hitched my hair and scraped my skin.
Bottles in the cooler clinked like dice.
Nights, I would wait for the first fish
to swallow the hook. The trick, I learned,
was not to force it, was to let the fish feel the pain
that comes from blindness and mistake.
Still, the Shore by Keith Leonard
About Still, the Shore
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 the speaker's urgency, his need to "get this right." These poems are brave in their honesty, vulnerability and violence. They cut. They scrape. And they are more beautiful for doing so.
—Leah Nielson, author of No Magic
About Keith Leonard
Keith Leonard is the author of the chapbook, Still, the Shore (YesYes Books, 2013) and the full-length collection, Ramshackle Ode (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) . Keith has held fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Indiana University, where he received an MFA. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming from the Academy of American Poets, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast. Keith lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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