The Understudy's Handbook: Poems

by Steven Leyva

Drawing heat and music (and luscious food) from a New Orleans and Houston childhood, Steven Leyva's poetry reveals a sensibility forged by a growing awareness of race and child's joy and bafflement, a black Baltimore father's worry. These gorgeous poems sweep the reader as into a parade, of memory, sensation, rhythm, protest.

Genres: Poetry

108 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2020

Reviews

[Eliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are lively poems that jump to a tight beat, that arc and twist in performative feats. They are a feast of joys and drama and, perhaps above all, an extended exploration of the masks one wears to assemble what we like to think of as an identity, but which is really just a provisional collage of moments, choices, roles that we carry around and hope like he’ll mean something in the end. We get everything from the vibrancy of New Orleans, the the deaths of relatives, to theatrical performances (bonus: August Wilson references galore!), the many nuances of being mixed race in America. A feast of experience and introspection, at times jubilant and other times somber. Leyva is a well-disciplined craftsman. These poems are so well-structured and sonically precise.
Lines and images clean as bone. Great read to end the year.

[Billie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book just after it was released and have been enjoying it in tastes and sips until I finished it last night. It is, on some level, futile for a person who isn't a poet to attempt an adequate review of poetry this rich. Let it suffice to say that this book of poems is heavy with memory, with wit, and with a cheerful refusal to either whitewash or scorn what has come before. To read The Understudy's Handbook is to read a life lived as an unapologetic story: heady with meaning.

[Tonee Mae Moll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This full-length debut from Leyva is a portrait of a poet who explores language with both a scholars curiosity and an unabashed love of its possibilities.

The collection he has put together reveals an attentiveness to the ways that language reveals a place, its values, and its effect on the self. The poems build a mosaic of traditions and allusions, both sonic possibility and love of the image, both a poetics of place and a poetics of identity.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The summer's slow pleasure
pulled out like a sleeper sofa, or how the cross
bar of memory impresses on a chest. Juveniles, we
were all Juveniles, ha. No one would deny us I-10
plunging across the city's abdomen like a cesarean scar." (9)

"I have not loved
my innocence, overdressed in morning light.
How can the earth keep turning
to the thing that will kill it?" (92)

[Tracy Gold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a trip to New Orleans with the musical poetry in this tight volume. Then sojourn back to Baltimore for a few poems and even head out to outer space for "Ode to Lando Calrissian." Leyva's poetry engages with both the politics of the real world and the politics of pop culture.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a novice student of poetry and appreciated this collection as a style of poetry with which I was unfamiliar and that had an aesthetic that made me feel like I was visiting New Orleans even though I have never been there.

[Naomi Ayala · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful, sharp-eyed debut collection. These poems pack such a tight punch in their lyric. I savored them over the course of two weeks, re-reading them in two's and three's.