Mia Leonin
Mia Angela Leonin is the author of Braid (Anhinga Press, 1999) and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press, Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series, 2008). Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner and River Styx, among others. Leonin is of Cuban-American descent and was raised in Missouri. She lives in Miami, Florida where she teaches at the University of Miami and frequently writes about performance, dance and theater. Her web site address is www.mialeonin.com.
This stunning collection wakens in us the miracle and mystery of becoming, being, and belonging — common to our shared humanity across cultures. From mothers and soldiers, war to birth, Missouri to Iraq, these poems are more than mere portraiture; they are sculptural, creating a three-dimensional sense of the many lives and places that Leonin has chiseled with her metaphorical muscle and carved with her deft language.
— Richard Blanco, Fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet
Mia Leonin’s Chance Born begins with the birth of her daughter, a moment which launches this collection of poems into profound questions about relations — children and the worlds of want and violence; words and the redemptive power of language; identity without the fabric of family. Visceral, lyrical and metaphorical, these poems radiate — like the intricate branches of a marvelous family tree.
— Valerie Martínez, author of Each and Her
CHANCE BORN BY MIA LEONIN $20.00.
UNRAVELING THE BED
BY MIA LEONIN
$17.00. (email us for availability)
Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series (2008)
In Unraveling the Bed, Mia Leonin invents a remarkably specific and vertiginous world of veils and magic, blood and azul thinning to translucent, a frightening and tender portrait of a woman who is sometimes barely breathing and, at other times, rising fully into her opaque human self. What is most remarkable to me in these poems is Leonin's craft -- language that is mouth-wateringly rich, whether in line-breaks or prose -- and the way the poems seem to paint themselves before the eyes. I am grateful for this feast of words and for the enormous spirit behind them, and for the complex stories that changed me as I read. To quote Rukeyser... there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created. Mia Leonin offers us a work that raises and transforms energy from a deep, wise, and holy place. -- Maureen Seaton, author of Venus Examines Her Breast
Leonin's poems are simply audacious, their language expanding and clarifying sex, honor, love, and even God, whose blood, in one poem, spills onto his sandals. In all, the speaker in these poems, as Leonin says, "commands her body / To lift the weight of its joy." All books of poems should be this exciting.
Something must be said for the subtle power of the female voice in these poems, even when the woman seems to be suffering from rejection or loss. These are more than love poems. When the "business suits" try to demean her by calling, "linda, linda, linda," the woman's wit comes to her rescue: "The ambassador is swallowed in three pieces by his suit," she reports. In the nine-part poem "The Invention of Skin," the speaker addresses her portrait painter, "I don't pose. I appear." Unraveling the Bed is literary, transcendent writing, and it makes us all into spiritual beings. --Robert Stewart, Outside Language: Essays, Editor, New Letters
Leonin's display and description of all things passionate literally feels like it's coming from "thunder's mouth." The effect is provocative, exciting, and intoxicating. Moreover, and most importantly: Leonin's passionate poetry is endearing, thrilling, and relevant because of her skill, language, and heart. -- Michael Parker, MiPOesias, March 2008
About the CD:
The CD that accompanies Unraveling the Bed was composed and produced by Carlos Ochoa. Integrating site-specific recordings, electronic beats and instrumental music with readings of the poems, Ochoa has created a free style musical interpretation of the poetry. Live instruments performed on the CD are keyboards, guitar, flute, and the Andean moseño.
About Carlos Ochoa:
Carlos Ochoa is from Lima, Peru. He has lived in Miami since 1991, performing with the bands Pepe Alva & Alma Raymi, Bronce and Cantamarka. Carlos is trained in the classical flute and guitar, and specializes in electronic composition and Andean folklore instruments such as the quena, sampoña, and charango. He has recorded with the artists Shakira, Gloria Estefan, Soledad, Los Bacilos, and others.
BRAID
BY MIA LEONIN
$11.00. (email us for availability)
Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series (1999)
What an older poet looks for in a first book by a younger poet is intensity of language -- "the startle effect," a term applied to the grasping motion infants instinctually make. It reminds us of our descent from trees, our human nature, our reliance on speech. Reading Mia Leonin's poems makes me newly aware of how we use imagery to save ourselves from falling. Leonin is observant and imaginative. In one instance she is inside the mind of a blind person; in another, an aged woman. The nuances of her environment are not lost on her. Potions and magic spells exert a powerful hold on her work as she struggles to come to terms with her part-Hispanic, part Midwestern background. Some of these poems are oracular, hard to riddle. A few are abstract and defy definition. But on balance this is a lively and engaging first book. --Maxine Kumin
Braid is pervaded by successive surges of heat, flood and drought. Summer-stuck windows seal in tract housing of electric mixers, Pekingese dogs, wigs, school shoes, cut-off jeans; recitals, remedies and overly fresh relatives. Interludes of blindness and early marriage surrender to the gradual whiskey-sour dusk of recognition and insight. Mia Leonin plaits her coming-of-age and coming-to-terms narratives into a sensuous and obdurate Southern identity. -- C.D. Wright
Poem from Unraveling the Bed
Océano
Under the fraction of stars and seaweed and sighs,
those sturdy leather shoes pulled you into the sea.
Like two blind calves, they carried you on their backs.
I followed, our jellyfish sleeves
billowing out then clinging
to each new wave.
Fleshy hands, moonlight of teeth.
Your middle name beating between my ribs.
The tide does nothing but divide and divide.
I can't go to the sea without dragging you along.
In every ruined shoe lies the memory:
the salt of your breath crystallized,
the method of your hands, your name
rushing between my ankles.
Poem from Braid
Mojo
Whether it's the myth of him
Or the peninsula,
Whether he dances across the burning bush flesh-footed
Or with bottle caps taped to his sneakers,
Whether his new girl is Barbie doll breasts
Or corn-stuffed body, red-yarned hair,
All the dolls are watching me tonight--mouths hemmed shut,
Eyes glued wide, as I cut and drain the bird that is my heart.
Candles are lit to remember. Eucalyptus heals.
Grandmother, teach me to forget.
Sit up old woman. Undo your tomb.
Clear the coal and venom from your throat one last time.
To forget him: Gather up your hair.
Divide it into his three most intimate parts:
His fingers longer than Moses' walking stick.
The indentation in the center of his chest.
His fear of touching jewelry.
Braid these three parts the entire length of your hair.
You know what's next, ungrateful child. You know.
Poem from Chance Born
Before Eve Was a Palindrome
La necesidad es la madre de la invención.
Before fig leaf and corset,
she shaped herself into a pear,
her proportions, a beguiling
target for the spear.
Tugging on a single thread,
Eve unraveled a labyrinth.
From sun-dripped wax,
she fashioned a candle.
Eve added water to meat
and named it stew. Wise and otherwise,
she looked into the hand’s hungry hollow
and invented the spoon.
Before plague and pestilence, Eve called
trans-fats lard and micro greens leaves.
She saw sea-level rise sloshing
in the seal’s glossy-orbed stare.
She predicted financial collapse
in the glint of Sacajawea’s gold coin.
In the moonlit snarl of a dog’s fang, she foretold
cyberbullying and unlimited filibusters.
God in reverse reads muzzle and leash.
Unlike evil, devil, and every other backmasking
Stairway-to-Heaven invention, Eve
was never meant to be read backwards.