The Opposite of Cruelty
eBook - ePub

The Opposite of Cruelty

Poems

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Opposite of Cruelty

Poems

About this book

Steven Leyva'ssecond collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man's lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology.

In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva's poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise "the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come." For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you'll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one's self represented in art and film.

This book 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."

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Yes, you can access The Opposite of Cruelty by Steven Leyva in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Blair
Year
2025
Print ISBN
9781958888346
eBook ISBN
9781958888452
Edition
0

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. I: Filament
  7. II: Ouroboros
  8. III: Pig-Headed Light
  9. Acknowledgments
  10. Notes