The Opposite of Cruelty

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.” 

"Leyva's voice breaks through the surface of daily life to give us the depth of origin, place, history, and music. His second collection, remarkable for embracing lyricism, narrative, and political consciousness, is a homecoming into childhood, fatherhood, and one's responsibility to live kindly in the erratic world. Whether in Baltimore or in New Orleans, he draws his rhythms and metaphors from life's fleeting passages, wrestling with what it means to recognize and record their beauty. The book emphasizes Leyva's range—he is a poet of cities, of fleeting time, a love poet, a friend poet, a father poet, a community poet, which is to say, a historian of the American heart."

—Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected