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.” 

"Steven Leyva’s The Opposite of Cruelty reads like a series of odes and vignettes praising the very fact of daily Black life.  Each poem is careful to move that which is mundane to a position of praise from the right amount of salt necessary for making grits to worms who 'perform their transubstantiation/through the fragile dark.' Witty, ambitious, and formally inventive, The Opposite of Cruelty is a beautiful book."
—Jericho Brown, The Tradition

“I’ve admired Steven Leyva’s poems for as long as I’ve been lucky to call him my friend, and his second collection, The Opposite of Cruelty, makes it easy to remember why: he is a poet of compassionate eye and generous spirit, who braids music and rigorous thought into each of his carefully textured lines with aplomb. In these odes and aubades, self-portraits and pastorals, sonnets both broken and doubled, I recognize a poet in full possession of his gifts, who praises the world, despite the world, and sings to us of its complex and unexpected beauty. So when the poet asks, early in this fine collection, “why do I bother / to slash and slash and slash / white from this page?”, I hear the unspoken answer: to love.”
—Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence: poems

“Steven Leyva’s newest book, The Opposite of Cruelty, is full of lyrics that pack more music and thinking into one line than many poets pack into a whole poem. Here are expansive, tensile sonnets that explore the fragility and intensity of joy, that sing the praises of both ancient myth and popular culture, that meld the devotional to the political. Here are odes and aubades, here are poems that playfully reinvent poetic form in order to question the constructions (and restrictions) we’ve used to socially imagine race. This is a generous, beautiful collection that speaks directly about how and what we choose to love in this dazzling, changeable, sometimes frightening world.”
—Paisley Rekdal, West: A Translation

“These poems break the conventions of time and place to make a map of family here and on the other side of here. Leyva makes a map for a son, reminding him to ‘keep your heart.’ These poems ask, ‘What would the world be if it had you instead of your legacy?’ And in answer, we, the reader and the poet, make art, a life, a home. Reading The Opposite of Cruelty is like listening to a mix of Charles Mingus, Nina Simone, and Outkast while setting fire to the world's most famous maps.”
—Tyree Daye, a little bump in the earth and Cardinal

"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, Music for the Dead and Resurrected