Poet and scholar (and anime enthusiast) Steven Leyva believes we – the human “we” – have been malformed by cruelty in ways that make it hard to recognize the beauty that moves through our lives and through each other.
Leyva’s latest collection, The Opposite of Cruelty, explores where he has found such beauty and meaning for his art: in the personal and historical forces that shape his writing and in how his family – prismatic in its diversity – serves as a lens through which he views the world. From meditations on the circular nature of origin in Ouroboros to the stubborn hope of connection in Pigheaded Light, the collection itself refuses to offer simple answers to the question its title begs: “What is the opposite of cruelty?”
Because that’s not the point. “That’s not what poetry is for,” Leyva tells Vol. 1 Brooklyn during a midweek Zoom call.
Actually, I’d like to start with why you’ve sectioned your collection into three parts: Filament, Ouroboros, and Pigheaded Light. Why did you structure your book this way?
Those three section titles all have something to do with light. They also consider how we see something or see certain things out in the world, and ultimately how we are allowing ourselves to see or not see beauty. As a whole, with this collection, you’ll see “beauty” a lot. But why those three sections? In Filament, I was thinking a lot about some big topics and some origin type topics. So, you’ll see stuff that has to do with things that feel like immigration or colonialism.
I noticed a lot of geography, especially in Filament.
There’s a consideration of movement of people and how we tell certain stories about those movements. And many of them are related to identities that intersected with mine or things directly out of my own history or genealogy. And so Filament, which is the part of the light bulb that burns to create light when we run electricity through a piece of metal, that’s like when we run our imagination through something. How does it burn and then cast light on something else? I was thinking about that in terms of history, in terms of geography, in terms of origins. And so a lot of those poems begin there. But the first poem in that section is called A Poem Avoiding Its Own Tour Of Force. Even though I’m thematically thinking about beginnings, I’m also thinking about how fraught it is to pinpoint one. I sometimes talk about that poem as being full of false starts.
I could begin with the slate roof of sunset
the smog has given us, or the low growl
in the throat of a window—the A/C unit
exasperated. I could begin with the cold
color of gun metal, the aria of the bullet:
sing a song full of the faith that the dark
past has taught us.
From “A Poem Avoiding Its Own Tour of Force”
Your clarification just explained so much. It’s funny how poetry does that. Now I can see “the light.” What, then, is the significance of Ouroboros in terms of light?
Some of it is just like it’s circular. So you pinpoint an origin, and maybe it’s no accident that the word origin in English begins with an O, right?
Right.
So origin implies some circular movement. And Ouroboros [the poetry section] is trying to consider some of that. And that’s also why there’s all these odes in that section.
I was going to ask you about the homage within Ouroboros–the aubade, the odes, the sonnets, everything.
So, there’s a little bit of once we can see, trying to praise what we can see, trying to bring it back to the ordinary, to the kind of praise of some ordinary things, and certainly identifying some pop culture things like black superheroes and so on and so forth. Ouroboros is trying to think about not looking to the past or looking to the future, but looking in a circular way at the things around us; that which is in our proximity. It considers: how do you respond to some of the cruelty out of which we were kind of placed in when we’re born? Like we’re born into a history, we’re born into bodies, we’re born into identities, and then, well, how do you deal with that, right?
Sunrise burst in like an angry lover
packed its things in a trunk of fog
and escaped into gossip for days.
You said, Fuck off, steaming the apartment window
your thigh pristine with sweat instead of sunlight
and I thought that curse was for the eye
of heaven, not the swaying drunks gawking on the cobblestone street below.
-From “Aubade for Nuit #1”
Is that your cruelty to you? Just us being born, corporeal to an extent? Like existing?
No, no, but I think history is cruel, right?
Sure.
The cruelty is the fact that we bear the brunt of people’s past imaginations and past colonizations and past actions. It’s not nihilistic; it’s just the fact that we are born and to be born is to struggle.
To suffer.
Right, to suffer, but the suffering is not abstract. The suffering is because people did cruel things, set up cruel systems. They invented the technology of race and racism. That stuff is the thing that we come into. But then what do we do with that? How do we then keep moving in a way that tries to answer the central question of the book, which is what is the opposite of cruelty?
That’s what I was going to ask eventually.
That question shows up in the crown of sonnets, Halo, right?
…How did we manage
to fix a leaking fridge and a basement light socket by the grace of YouTube?
And this is the easiest of our questions. We don’t talk of the third day
without water my mother endured in Texas. What is the opposite of cruelty?
-From “Halo”
I was going to ask specifically if you wrote Halo as the central focus of the collection, because it’s broken up into parts and it’s significantly different to me than a lot of the other poems. To me, the other poems kind of ripple outward around it, even though it’s placed well into the Filament section.
I recognized that poem as an anchor, and then we kind of pulled the title from it. And that poem happens late in the first section, late in Filament. And so then in some ways, it offers one kind of answer. “We scrub our teeth with any comfort,” is one way that the poem itself, Halo, answers that question that it asks explicitly. But then I think of Ouroboros as the larger, to use the metaphor you just used, rippling of that answer. It’s not simply we medicate ourselves with comfort, we look around and we see ourselves in the media, we see ourselves in other people, we see people being principled. And so there’s a kind of consideration of the larger answer lived out in Ouroboros.
And then Pigheaded Light…
And then just to put a cap on it for Pigheaded Light… ultimately, if you move from the source, which recognizes and sees the cruelty to an answer about what the opposite of it is, into looking at how that affects our everyday lives, what is then the tangible result of that? And my way of thinking about that is that is: it’s human connection. It’s the stubbornness of human connection. So like pigheaded, that stubborn light, is that we need one another. Flat out. And obviously it uses a quote from Lord of the Flies. Many readers will recognize the significance of the that pig head. But it’s more me thinking about that human connection is not some kind of Pollyannish answer to the question of what’s the opposite sort of cruelty? It’s the result of what we do once we answer that question.
That’s kind of how I took it too after reading through the collection a couple of times—that there isn’t a single answer to the question: What is the opposite of cruelty? But that’s the first thing you think of when you see the title. Everyone has to answer it for themselves. Is it action? Activism? Deep personal connection? Is it all those things? Or maybe something we haven’t even considered yet.
I don’t think the answer is ultimately compassion. Although I do believe we should be compassionate, compassion alone is not enough. Compassion is abstract. And in that sense, I think Keats is right: “What is true is beautiful. What is beautiful is true.” We’ve been malformed by cruelty in ways that make it hard to recognize the beauty that moves through our lives and through each other. The collection doesn’t offer a single answer to the question “What is the opposite of cruelty?” In fact, as a writer, poet, and scholar, I’m suspicious of easy answers to complex questions. Sometimes, people come to poetry expecting a neatly packaged, clean answer, but that’s not what poetry is for.
Yeah, poetry makes you think and wrestle with things.
Exactly. If I’m being honest, I haven’t thought about it quite like that before, but I do think a lot about family and its role in culture. My family, in many ways, looks like America. I am both African American and Afro-Latino. My mother is Black Creole from New Orleans, and my father is Latino from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. If you go up one generation on my father’s side, his grandfather was white from France, and his maternal grandfather was Indigenous from Mayan and Aztec ancestry. And then, through me and down to my children, that lineage continues. I actually explore this in a poem—a double sonnet instead of an introduction. My son can climb one branch of the family tree and see Scotland and Germany. His middle name is Japanese. When I think about history and how America generates identity, my family is a metonymy of that experience. We exist within those spaces. So, highlighting that feels important. But I think this is true for all families. Families act as prisms—when you pass light through them, that light fragments, revealing many different things. And I find that both true and beautiful.
Your son
can climb one branch up the family tree and see Scotland and Germany. His middle name is Japanese.
What even is a race? Confetti after the parade.
-From “Double Sonnet Instead of an Introduction”
Yeah, every family dynamic has that ability. I agree.
Exactly. We are prismatic. That’s how I would put it.
This might be a cliché question, but I like to ask all poets—do you have a favorite poem in the collection? Or perhaps one that was particularly difficult to write, whether because of the process or its emotional weight?
Oh, man. I don’t know if I have a single favorite. I feel close to different poems for different reasons. But let me try to answer it through one of those branches. There are two poems in Pigheaded Light that stand out. One is Post-tenure—
Oh, I love that one.
That’s a rare occasional poem for me. I wrote it for the retirement of two of my grad school teachers, Kendra Kopelke and Steve Matanle. I gave it to them at the time, and I think Smartish Pace published it before it made its way into the book. I have a particular fondness for that poem—not because I think it’s technically my best, but because it honors two writers who didn’t get enough recognition. Without them, I wouldn’t be a poet. There would be no Opposite of Cruelty, no book at all.
The libraries
are filled with your students. The inner harbors of the mind are thick
with blackbirds. I say Thank you, and mean Don’t leave, I mumble
gratitude, and mean rescued. Damn all the anthologies that ever were.
Damn their whispers. Damn the good night, the gentle, and the going.
Praise the play. Praise the heart’s handmade book.
-From “Post-Tenure”
The other poem is Charismatic, written for my closest friend from college, Kyle. That section of the book focuses on human connection, and these two poems feel deeply personal to me. Actually, Kyle once sent me a recording of himself reading Charismatic—a kind of full-circle moment.
Oh, so it’s been around for a while?
Yeah, a few years at least. Hearing him read a poem about himself was surreal. But those two poems stand out because of the personal ties, even though they aren’t about my family. They are close to my heart. There’s also Self-Portrait as Prince of the Fire Nation—
Oh, I love that one too!
It references Avatar: The Last Airbender, specifically Zuko. He has a fraught relationship with his father, which allowed me to explore my own complicated relationship with my father. Sometimes, pop culture references in poetry can obscure meaning, but in this case, it illuminated my personal experience rather than hiding it. That felt like a breakthrough.
Yeah, it doesn’t overshadow the emotions; it just provides a different lens.
Exactly. And I think that’s the role of poetry—it helps us articulate the specific in a way that resonates universally. The path to the universal is always through the specific.
Absolutely. That’s what makes it so powerful. One last question—do you find yourself feeling less optimistic now than when you wrote these poems?
Oh, definitely. But I still believe in imagination. The imagination is the opposite of cruelty. Cruelty is banal, repetitive. Imagination is about possibility, about envisioning something better. If my book leaves readers with anything, I hope it’s that: a sense of possibility, of imagining something beyond the cycles of harm we so often find ourselves in.
That’s a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Steven.
Thank you. It was great talking to you.
Steven Leyva is the author of The Understudy’s Handbook (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2020) and The Opposite of Cruelty (Blair, 2025).
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