Ramshackle Ode
Author(s): Keith Leonard

A sparklingdebut collection from a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet that makes an ecstatic argument for living

Containing joy and suffering side by side,Ramshackle Odeoffers elegies and odes as necessary partners to bring out the greatest power in each. By turns celebratory, meditative, tender, and rebellious, these poems reimagine the divisions and intersections of life and death, the human and the natural world, the brutal and the beautiful. Time and again, they choose hope.

From an award-winning young poet in the tradition of Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, Gerald Stern, and contemporary American bard Maurice Manning, Ramshackle Odepresents a new voice singing toward transcendence, offering the sense that, though this world is fragile, human existence is a wonderfully stubborn miracle of chance.

Review(s):
“Intriguing and triumphant, Leonards collection embodies the subject matter it so aptly depicts, whether its a storm or steeple or meadow.”Booklist “In his lovely first collection, Pushcart Prize nominee Leonard offers poems both tough and tender about becoming a maneffectively so, as these works are not full of false bravado but touching reflection…Charmed and sturdy poems for a wide range of readers.”Library Journal “Keith Leonards Ramshackle Ode is a brilliant, heart breaking, sometimes funny, always surprising celebration of love and attachment, of all the ways our connection to othersfriends, lovers, childrenmakes us hostages to fortune. The force of imagination and the urgent desire to praise, to care for and cultivate is always at every point tested by the equal force of depredation and defilement. This is a terrific and memorable first book. Leonards voice is powerfully distinct and fresh, and its one Im sure well be hearing with gratitude for years to come.”Alan Shapiro “The poems in this solid collection offer praise for the everyday world, even if coming to terms with that world entails a measure of surrender. That world is given to us, we are included in it, and yet the heart and the mind must be pried open in order to receive and realize how much of that world may lie beyond us. Poetry is the ages-old means to see beyond, to glimpse whats out there and to praise even what we dont yet know. These poems do not linger on grief; instead, they reveal a heart that has been opened to love and a mind flung out to wonder. That is the solemn human journey. No rest for the wicked, is the common expression. No rest for the joyful and compassionate either. That is the discovery these poems field, like pop-flies and grounders in a backyard baseball game played so long ago in youth it has the resonance of myth. These poems have earned their wisdom, and this book is a gift I happily hold in my hands.”Maurice Manning If you want to know what the good, serious, workby which I mean digging and plowing and axing and building and sewing and holdingof joywhich includes, yes, no kidding, sorrow, loss, heartbreak, the whole abundant messmight make of the world, of a family, of a lifegoddamn, goddamnI think this book might give you an idea. Its kind of the hardest work, joy. Which makes Ramshackle Ode one of the hardest working books Ive read in a long time.Ross Gay Ramshackle.Synonyms:neglected, gone to rack and ruin, beat-upand aren’t we? Isn’t our house in tumbledown? Somedays it seems it’s all getting to be too much now, that you’re beat up just by living.Ramshackle Odeis more than a great book of poems, it’s a tent revival, a people’s sweatyredemption. Keith Leonard has come right in the nick of timeto remind us: inside each our hearts thumps an ecstatic hot night of healing, and raise thattambourine!hallelujahbe, there’s still a song, goddamnit there’sstill a chance to sing. Rebecca Gayle Howell

ISBN:9780544649675