#john leo

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MY FAVORITE POETRY OF 2024 (Prologue) This was a bit of a different reading year for me. There were plenty of new books that I enjoyed, but I was mostly dipping into (not rereading cover to cover) books I've read before. Also, I've been reading a lot for my Jewish studies, which is time I wasn't reading fiction or poetry. So while I did read a fair amount, the total of that isn't reflected in this annual end-of-year book post.

On the ground level, this was another good year for me. My second full-length poetry collection, Wrong Horse, was published by Moria Books in January. In October, a chapbook of "spooky" poems, There's Nothing Out There, was published by above/ground press. I had ten poems published across five magazines and six more poems accepted for publication and appearing next year. My second book hasn't gotten as many reviews as I'd hoped so far, but I think its release did help me be part of more readings this year, which was very fun (special shout out to the folks who came out for the Wrong Tour dates).

Of course, I wasn't able to read all I wanted to this year--a good problem to have for the future. And, as always, these books are just my favorites, not a best of list.

FAVORITE FULL-LENGTH POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2024 Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions) This is Not a Place of Honor by John Leo (Night Gallery) The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher (Wesleyan)

FAVORITE CHAPBOOK OF 2024 Swim Lessons by Elizabeth Taddonio (self-released)*

FAVORITE POETRY COLLECTION OF LAST YEAR (2023) I DIDN’T READ UNTIL THIS YEAR (2024) Ablation by Danika Stegeman (11:11 Press)

FAVORITE POEM PUBLISHED IN 2024 "On Love" by Sara Nicholson in Little Mirror

FAVORITE NOVEL PUBLISHED IN 2024 I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (Grove Atlantic)

DID MY FAVORITE FICTION WRITER PUBLISH A NEW BOOK IN 2024 BECAUSE IF SHE DID I READ IT Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams (Tin House)

BOOK THAT MESSED ME UP IN 2024 Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars tr. Alan Brown (NYRB Classics, 2004)

REMAINING TBR FROM THIS YEAR (2024) James by Percival Everett (Knopf) Falling Fine: Selected and New Poems by Matt Hart (Ledge Mule) You Like It Darker by Stephen King (Scribner)**

CURRENTLY READING Collected Poems by Louis Jenkins (Will O' the Wisp Books)

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*A collection of nonfiction essays.

**Some of stories in this collection I was able to read via audiobook. I was most interested in the "sequel" to Cujo, "Rattlesnakes," which I did listen to and thought was better than Cujo.

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Driving the Snow Blower, Getting Closer to the Divine: Nate Logan’s Wrong Horse, Reviewed by John Leo

Reading a Nate Logan poem is like playing with a jack-in-the-box. In fact, most of the poems in Wrong Horse consist of a single square of pr

My thanks to John Leo for this generous review of Wrong Horse in The Indianapolis Review!

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Tonight! Live in Minneapolis!

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Anything Goes

An article on tolerance got me thinking about Judith Levine and Peter Singer, two people I’d rather not think about. Levine suggests that sex between children and adults in some circumstances is not only okay but actually a good thing for the child.

She says most kids will say yes to sexuality at some point during their childhood or adolescent years and our choice as adults is whether or not we will help make those experiences safe, consensual, and happy.

According to Levine abstinence is as old-fashioned as the horse-and-buggy and totally unrealistic in today’s enlightened society. Pleasure of any kind is not to be denied to anyone, including children.

Never before has sex been as explicitly exploited in every aspect of the media as it is today. It’s in movies, music, and prime-time TV—and mostly presented as raunchy, loveless, and often violent.

Columnist John Leo says in a Zogby International poll of college seniors, seventy-three percent of the students said when their teachers taught about ethical issues the usual message was that uniform standards of right and wrong do not exist. What is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity.

Leo cites a college professor who reported that ten to twenty percent of his students could not bring themselves to criticize the Nazi extermination of Jews. Most students admitted they personally did not approve of the treatment of the Jews but would not say that the Nazis were wrong since “no culture can be judged from the outside and no individual can challenge the moral worldview of another.”

Leo says college students are rarely taught this directly but they absorb it as part of the multicultural, tolerant, diversified, nonjudgmental campus culture.

Are we moving into an near-surrealistic society where there is no right or wrong, anything goes, and no one judges or condemns anyone for anything including rape, torture, and mass murder?

Just when you think things can’t get any weirder, out trots Peter Singer.

Dr. Singer sits in the catbird seat of the Ethics Department at Princeton University. Radio talk-show host Glenn Beck assures his national audience that ten to twelve pages of any of Singer’s several books is enough to make any sane person’s head explode, but that Singer has outdone himself by claiming it is fine for people to have sex with animals as long as the sex is consensual. 

Singer’s “speciesism” denies the sanctity of human life. He argues, as if atheism were an obvious fact accepted by all, that since there is no divine sanction human life is worth no more than any form of animal life.

He contends that what makes one a “person” is reasoning, remembering, and recognizing others. Therefore fetuses, newborns, and Alzheimer victims are not persons but dogs and dolphins are. So since a newborn, like a three-month-old fetus, is not rational or self-conscious, infanticide, like abortion is not morally wrong.

Beck says he suspects he has somehow been hurled into a parallel universe; no such bizarre goings-on could possibly be happening in our own sane world.

It must have been in Beck’s upside-down, topsy-turvy, parallel universe that a colorful tabloid at a supermarket checkout featured a grinning three-hundred-pound Rosie O’Donnell, her chubby arm draped around the slender shoulder of her blonde girlfriend, declaiming to the world, “We’re pregnant!”

Go figure. Or call Judith Levine or Peter Singer.

Original Article