Keith Leonard's poems have appeared in Best New Poets,Copper Nickel, and 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 earned his MFA at Indiana University.

Books by Keith Leonard:

Other poems on the web by Keith Leonard:
Four poems
"Museum"
Two poems
"Ode to the Unsayable"
"Ode to the Grotesque"
Five poems
Three poems
"Robin's Egg"
"Donald Trump's Face"

Keith Leonard's Website.

About Ramshackle Ode:

"Keith Leonard's Ramshackle Ode is a brilliant, heart breaking, sometimes funny, always surprising celebration of love and attachment, of all the ways our connection to others—friends, lovers, children—makes us hostages to fortune. The force of imagination and the urgent desire to praise, to care for and cultivate is always at every point tested by the equal force of depredation and defilement. This is a terrific and memorable first book. Leonard's voice is powerfully distinct and fresh, and it's one I'm sure we'll be hearing with gratitude for years to come."
—Rebecca Gayle Howell

"The poems in this solid collection offer praise for the everyday world, even if coming to terms with that world entails a measure of surrender. That world is given to us, we are included in it, and yet the heart and the mind must be pried open in order to receive and realize how much of that world may lie beyond us. Poetry is the ages-old means to see beyond, to glimpse what's out there and to praise even what we don't yet know. These poems do not linger on grief; instead, they reveal a heart that has been opened to love and a mind flung out to wonder. That is the solemn human journey. No rest for the wicked, is the common expression. No rest for the joyful and compassionate either. That is the discovery these poems field, like pop-flies and grounders in a backyard baseball game played so long ago in youth it has the resonance of myth. These poems have earned their wisdom, and this book is a gift I happily hold in my hands."
—Maurice Manning

"If you want to know what the good, serious, work—by which I mean digging and plowing and axing and building and sewing and holding—of joy—which includes, yes, no kidding, sorrow, loss, heartbreak, the whole abundant mess—might make of the world, of a family, of a life—goddamn, goddamn—I think this book might give you an idea. It's kind of the hardest work, joy. Which makes Ramshackle Ode one of the hardest working books I've read in a long time."
—Ross Gay