Ramshackle Ode, Paperback

A sparkling debut collection from a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet that makes an ecstatic argument for living

Containing joy and suffering side by side, Ramshackle Ode offers elegies and odes as necessary partners to bring out the greatest power in each. By turns celebratory, meditative, tender, and rebellious, these poems reimagine the divisions and intersections of life and death, the human and the natural world, the brutal and the beautiful. Time and again, they choose hope.

From an award-winning young poet in the tradition of Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, Gerald Stern, and contemporary American bard Maurice Manning, Ramshackle Ode presents a new voice singing toward transcendence, offering the sense that, though this world is fragile, human existence is a wonderfully stubborn miracle of chance.

Keith Leonard's poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. A winner of the Beacon Street Prize and scholarships at Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conference, he is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Indiana University.