You Are Alive When They Start to Eat You, by John T. Leonard

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In You Are Alive When They Start to Eat You, John T. Leonard maps a specifically American collapse that is both topographical and deeply internal. Rooted in the Midwest, this collection function as a surrealist tour (and spiritual autopsy). Leonard navigates a landscape where both the infrastructure and soul of the Rust Belt are dying, even as the people of this region remain tethered through shared guilt and pride, domesticity, daily disasters, and an exhausting instinct to protect the few remaining breaths of the land. It is a book about the weight of being a witness to a country that feels increasingly predatory, where the “theatrics of charity” and the “legal ways we kill people” are woven into the same fabric of a Sunday dinner table cloth.

The heart of this collection lies in the intersection of private grief and both public and state violence. Leonard explores the “disease” of empathy against a backdrop of school shootings, late-stage capitalism, detachment, and extinction. By blending the absurdity of modern consumerism with the raw, biblical coldness of the American interior, Leonard creates a portrait of survival that is messy, medicated, and stubbornly alive. These are poems for the “exit country,” written from the front lines of a daily, irreversible disaster. 

John T. Leonard is a writer and educator who serves as editor-in-chief of Rawhead and managing editor of 42 Miles Press and The Glacier. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. John’s poems have been published in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Louisiana Literature, South Florida Poetry Journal, Jelly Bucket, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Hole in The Head Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, and The Emerson Review, among many others. His poetry collection, Hunting Season is forthcoming from Wolfson Press. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana, with his wife and son. You can connect with him on Instagram @jotyleon.