And Luckier

Leatha Kendrick

Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you Leatha Kendrick's latest collection of poetry. We believe this is her bravest, most mature work, steeped with the wisdom and beauty of an intentionally-lived life. The poems in this book sooth us, teach us and nudge us forward toward our best, our kindest selves.

What Others Say About And Luckier

Kendrick's powerful fifth collection springs from a mature poet's reckoning: with the family she was given and the family she has made, with the struggle to answer her calling as an artist, with the dangers and diminishments of age, and with her privileged place in a suffering world. And Luckier opens with a dispassionate question: "who might it serve that you / would grow downhearted?" The poems that follow take us through many voices, subjects, and perspectives, bringing us at last to this hard-won counsel: "So much suffering. We cannot uncause it / But we can set ourselves to mend, / ... I will pick up the rubble. / I will carry one stone at a time."

—George Ella Lyon

As mass and spin in perfect balance keep Earth's creatures from being crushed by our own weight or flying off into airless space, so these poems maintain perfect tension between exquisite craft and beguiling imagination. Every turn of the page brings fresh delight of music and image, astonishing depth of vision. From the home fires of the hearth to the heart of the helix, Kendrick's poems remind us of what we forgot we knew about love and death, those timeless themes of poetry.

—Sherry Chandler

Some poets wear their hard-earned wisdom as lightly as earth holds the most delicate of its blooms—with roots fierce and stubborn, with stems "tough enough to wait out the drought / that comes before the bloom." I love Leatha Kendrick's new collection, And Luckier, for its graceful, ferocious holding. "What will your seeing make?" Kendrick asks in her opening poem. Hers has made these poems of witness and of healing, and we, her readers, are all the luckier for them.

—Pauletta Hansel

In her new collection And Luckier, poet Leatha Kendrick offers us an unflinching and holistic look at our world. Her poems are full of humanity, honestly set in that place where it is "impossible to separate / misery and joy—the living edge of mystery." Kendrick's work is complex and masterfully figurative, always allowing for two things to be said at once, two things to be true at once.

—Kathleen Driskell

Leatha Kendrick's latest collection, And Luckier, features the marvelous "Poem Without a Gazelle." The sonnet appears to be about waiting in a drab hospital room for test results, that is, until the speaker laments that a gazelle was supposed to leap into the poem. Instead, a woman in "cheerful printed scrubs' arrives (like a gazelle leaping in) with test results to say, "you're doing alright, at least for your age." This splendid turn epitomizes the dilemmas that And Luckier explores. Here's a book about the adjustment to age, the imperfections in the world, loss and what it makes of a person, and the poet as an "absentee Nana," her grandchild living far away. What does it mean, in a climate changed world, to pass the "stiff diorama" of degraded farmland to a scattered family? Kendrick valiantly copes with not having all the answers in And Luckier. Her combination of melancholy and gratitude provides all we can't know of life and its endings with a majestic understanding.

—Molly Peacock

Your Fear

Now ask yourself—who might it serve that you
would grow downhearted? What do you choose
to see? What will your seeing make? The "news"
selected and relayed, mirrored and soon
a billion times its weight, weighs on the mind
that seeks it out. What is the new? The breath
just drawn, the thought not yet enfleshed, the kind
word being said, the stars that press unseen
overhead. "It is the unforeseen
upon which," Poe said, "we must calculate
most largely." Impossible to separate
misery and joy—the living edge of mystery.
Time's unfolding, dauntless, holds you dear.
The universe has no need of your fear.

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: April 15, 2020
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-56-8
Price: $16.00

About the Author

Leatha Kendrick grew up on a southern Kentucky farm, daughter of a veterinarian and a high school home economics teacher. Oldest of four children, she was most at home in fields or barns (when not reading a book on the window seat and looking out at the horizon). Her adult life was spent in eastern Kentucky where she and her husband raised three daughters. Kendrick began writing seriously in midlife and found a first community of writers in Appalachia. Among her writing awards are two Al Smith fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as the Sallie Bingham Award and fellowships and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her poems, essays, memoir, and book reviews appear in journals including Tar River Poetry, Appalachian Heritage, New Madrid Review, the Southern Poetry Review, the James Dickey Review, The Southern Women's Review—and in many anthologies including The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 3—Contemporary Appalachia; Listen Here!: Women Writing in Appalachia; I to I—Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists; and What Comes Down to Us—Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets. She currently lives with her husband and one lively small black dog in Lexington, Kentucky. And Luckier is her fifth collection of poems.