Stray Latitudes: Poems
The poems in Dan Leach's debut collection present lyrical portraits of dying (if not already dead) suburban neighborhoods in South Carolina. Stalled-out construction sites, abandoned shopping malls, and builder grade houses that seem haunted before they're even sold--these are the doomed spaces that populate Leach's work. Stray Latitudes investigates the spiritual and geographical crises of the New South, pitting the individual need for identity against the recent swell of nationalism and the ongoing creep of capitalism. Like the vagrant creature for which the book is named, these are poems that scratch and claw in their search for a place to call home.
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Become an affiliateDAN LEACH has published work in Copper Nickel, The Southwest Review, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident Press, 2022). He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and currently teaches writing at Charleston Southern University. Stray Latitudes is his first collection of poetry.
--Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights
--Ed Skoog (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Dan Leach's Stray Latitudes has a restless, searching spirit that is both clear-eyed and deeply resonant. These poems allow their readers to glimpse something of the sublime in spaces where one might least expect it--a construction site, a discarded refrigerator, a fistfight with a sibling--and offer up a type of rugged wisdom, one that feels real and hard-earned."
--Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
--Matthew Olzmann (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"In this charming and succinct poetry collection by writer Dan Leach, 'faith may end in the heart, but it begins in the feet.' Stray Latitudes, as the title suggests, harnesses the chaos wrought by well-meaning attempts to manage and order human life. Attention to what's surreal, menacing, and strange is offered to us without the poet losing hold of what's sweet and tender. A genuine gift. I'm thankful to live in a world where poems like Leach's beckon, sweaty--tearful, resisting all the right answers. Saturated in discovery and disruption, this collection begs to be read on a porch somewhere, somewhere poems call us home, insisting next time, 'ask for the world.'"
--Lauren K. Carlson, author of Animals I Have Killed
--Lauren K. Carlson (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Stray Latitudes embraces the fleeting movements of human experience. Life moves fast here, building the loop we'll ride in a nameless cul-de-sac, pausing to hear and ask the questions we'll struggle to answer. These poems speak to us, say this is who we are, this is where we are now--somewhere in the space between the natural world that is living and the dying around us, and the life-drunk and the dead-sobriety that punctuates man's destruction--and they say this is where we'll be back again, trying to remember. What is so refreshing here is the acceptance, the confidence of a voice that understands the agency of memory, how we live in it, and with it. Because it, too, like 'everyone, even God, must be tested.' And that's where light of these poems come from. It is such a brilliant collection!"
--Ray McManus, author of The Last Saturday in America and Punch
--Ray McManus (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Stray Latitudes is a book interested in the big questions: how to live, how to love, how to keep faith in the face of doubt. Leach approaches these questions aslant, transforming the ordinary world around him into a place mysterious and full of wonder. A bulldozer becomes a lion; a garage turns into a cave; cigarette smoke curls through the air 'like a song / written in a tongue / long since dead.' It's hard to blend wry humor and total sincerity--but Leach does it seamlessly. Small-town South Carolina springs to life in each line. Each moment is meaningful, a microcosm of a much larger world, captured with careful detail and enormous heart."
--Katie Prince, author of Tell This to the Universe
--Katie Prince (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Dan Leach writes a hole into the wind. Through stumble after get up after stumble after love after stumble after dream his poems do the creatively impossible: they achieve balance without symmetry. But that is only the beginning. The real sparks fly when he turns the poem on himself and the world and disturbs the balance without the conversation crashing into personal rhetoric. No wonder he frightens all the half-truths we don't know how to live without. Stray Latitudes is a brilliant debut."
--Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?
--Barrett Warner (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Stray Latitudes opens mid-pandemic, immersed in eerie quiet of suburbia where new construction has halted, and bulldozers sleep like 'a pack of tired lions.' Leach gracefully braids issues of capitalism, global warming, sprawl, and loneliness where the weird panic of the present becomes permanent as 'the world moved inside.' In the latter part of the book, Leach explores memory, loss, and childhood, creating an atmosphere you can taste. Are all memories poems? Leach leads us down the abandoned alley, playing a 90's alt-rock soundtrack, smoking Reds, and making us believe that 'what you loved could never die.'"
--Natalie Solmer, Editor-in-Chief at The Indianapolis Review
--Natalie Solmer (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)