The Opposite of Cruelty: Poems

by Steven Leyva

Steven Leyva’s second 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.”

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

Published March 4, 2025

Reviews

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for one of my college courses last semester and WOW. I am so glad my professor assigned us this book to read. My class also had the pleasure to hear the author read a few of the poems. Him reading them and explaining the inspiration behind them only made me appreciate the poems so much more. These pieces are all so different yet extremely cohesive, they fit like a perfectly curated puzzle. The flow of them is also effective, these poems are complex but the flow allows them to remain easy to follow/comprehend despite the complexity. I don't want to say much else because I would rather you read it and experience it first-hand but this is truly an incredible read and I connected with each piece even if I didn't personally relate, which is such a gift for a poet to have.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You come from a Creole / so old no one can skin the pear of your first / language.”

mature, masterful poems. plus, any book with poems about Haikyuu!, Avatar the Last Airbender, X-Men, and more has my heart.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opposite of cruelty is our attention. As a poet, professor, & person, Leyva has so much care for the reader, for others. You don’t mull over these ideas without caring for how they are handled.

"Nearly every continent is in your genealogy: / You are Black. You come from a Creole / so old no one can skin the pear of your first / language. The whole of the Gulf rests / in your spit." (29)

Leyva's musicality & formal inventiveness is unmatched!! Go read this book immediately if you enjoy poetry. Even if you don't.

"Stay awake / is the hum of the mud. I can't decide which catfish is frying, history or memory, in the skillet." (43)

For fans of Jericho Brown, Paisley Rekdal. I read this book in March, Steven is a friend, and I still must say it's a favorite of the year!

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Is it too late

to learn defiance? To be less oblique? To sing into the head
of a sunflower as the bees do? Or am I still deciding?

whether I deserved to be loved? All hum and no hymn.”

- an excerpt from the poem, Iowa City Psalm.

This collection of poems are songs written to question, capture and paint the complexities, beauty and ponderings within Black life.