Boots of Spanish Leather, by Steven Joyce

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In Boots of Spanish Leather, Steven Joyce explores the thresholds between memory and departure, aging and desire, presence and disappearance. These poems move through rooms halfemptied, shorelines redolent of Greek myth, and landscapes where birds, ghosts, and historical figures flicker into view. Whether contemplating the quiet devastations of illness, the angular ache of Schiele’s canvases, or the small rituals that bind us to one another, the collection reveals how the ordinary becomes luminous when held up to the light of reflection.

Across scenes as intimate as a bedside vigil and as expansive as Hadrian’s Wall, Joyce’s speakers navigate the stubborn beauty and sorrow of lives in transition. The poems hum with elegy, wit, and a restless tenderness, inviting readers to sit in the halflight where love falters, endures, and sometimes slips away. Boots of Spanish Leather is a meditation on parting and persistence—on what we carry, what we leave behind, and the quiet music that rises from the spaces between.

Steven Joyce is Professor of German and comparative studies at the Ohio State University, Mansfield campus. He has published a book on G. B. Shaw entitled Transformations and Texts and an award-winning book of essays entitled The Winds of Ilion as well as a number of articles on literary theory and criticism. He has written three books of poetry—The Apostate Djin, (2013) A Sea of Other (2018) and A Small Pad of Paper (2021). He is currently working on a monograph of German writer Judith Hermann, which will be published by Peter Lang Oxford in 2026. Joyce is the recipient of several Fulbright grants and received Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2014. He holds a Ph. D. in comparative literature from UNC-Chapel Hill.