“Dan Leach’s Stray Latitudes doesn’t stray from the meaningful territories: how to be alert and helpful in a world that tries to deaden the senses and deny helpfulness. He brings fresh attention to the daily and lifelong struggles, with a keen-eyed hope, in signal poems from the book, including ‘Heat Wave,’ ‘Sobriety’ and ‘After The Summer We Would Only Wear Black Chuck Taylors,’ where behind the Harris Teeter, as in the pages of this book, the poet finds ‘the one place where if you closed your eyes long enough you could pretend you had never felt this before.’”
—Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights
“Dan Leach’s Stray Latitudes has a restless, searching spirit that is both clear-eyed and deeply resonant. These poems allow their readers to glimpse something of the sublime in spaces where one might least expect it—a construction site, a discarded refrigerator, a fistfight with a sibling—and offer up a type of rugged wisdom, one that feels real and hard-earned.”
—Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
“In this charming and succinct poetry collection by writer Dan Leach, ‘faith may end in the heart, but it begins in the feet.’ Stray Latitudes, as the title suggests, harnesses the chaos wrought by well-meaning attempts to manage and order human life. Attention to what’s surreal, menacing, and strange is offered to us without the poet losing hold of what’s sweet and tender. A genuine gift.
I’m thankful to live in a world where poems like Leach’s beckon, sweaty—tearful, resisting all the right answers. Saturated in discovery and disruption, this collection begs to be read on a porch somewhere, somewhere poems call us home, insisting next time, ‘ask for the world.’”
—Lauren K. Carlson, author of Animals I Have Killed
“Stray Latitudes embraces the fleeting movements of human experience. Life moves fast here, building the loop we’ll ride in a nameless cul-de-sac, pausing to hear and ask the questions we’ll struggle to answer. These poems speak to us, say this is who we are, this is where we are now—somewhere in the space between the natural world that is living and the dying around us, and the life-drunk and the dead-sobriety that punctuates man’s destruction—and they say this is where we’ll be back again, trying to remember. What is so refreshing here is the acceptance, the confidence of a voice that understands the agency of memory, how we live in it, and with it. Because it, too, like ‘everyone, even God, must be tested.’ And that’s where light of these poems come from. It is such a brilliant collection!”
—Ray McManus, author of The Last Saturday in America and Punch
“Stray Latitudes is a book interested in the big questions: how to live, how to love, how to keep faith in the face of doubt. Leach approaches these questions aslant, transforming the ordinary world around him into a place mysterious and full of wonder. A bulldozer becomes a lion; a garage turns into a cave; cigarette smoke curls through the air ‘like a song / written in a tongue / long since dead.’ It’s hard to blend wry humor and total sincerity—but Leach does it seamlessly. Small-town South Carolina springs to life in each line. Each moment is meaningful, a microcosm of a much larger world, captured with careful detail and enormous heart.”
—Katie Prince, author of Tell This to the Universe
“Dan Leach writes a hole into the wind. Through stumble after get up after stumble after love after stumble after dream his poems do the creatively impossible: they achieve balance without symmetry. But that is only the beginning. The real sparks fly when he turns the poem on himself and the world and disturbs the balance without the conversation crashing into personal rhetoric. No wonder he frightens all the half-truths we don't know how to live without. Stray Latitudes is a brilliant debut.”
—Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?
“Stray Latitudes opens mid-pandemic, immersed in eerie quiet of suburbia where new construction has halted, and bulldozers sleep like ‘a pack of tired lions.’ Leach gracefully braids issues of capitalism, global warming, sprawl, and loneliness where the weird panic of the present becomes permanent as ‘the world moved inside.’ In the latter part of the book, Leach explores memory, loss, and childhood, creating an atmosphere you can taste. Are all memories poems? Leach leads us down the abandoned alley, playing a 90’s alt-rock soundtrack, smoking Reds, and making us believe that ‘what you loved could never die.’”
—Natalie Solmer, Editor-in-Chief at The Indianapolis Review
“In this charming and succinct poetry collection by writer Dan Leach, ‘faith may end in the heart, but it begins in the feet.’ Stray Latitudes, as the title suggests, harnesses the chaos wrought by well-meaning attempts to manage and order human life. Attention to what’s surreal, menacing, and strange is offered to us without the poet losing hold of what’s sweet and tender. A genuine gift.
I’m thankful to live in a world where poems like Leach’s beckon, sweaty—tearful, resisting all the right answers. Saturated in discovery and disruption, this collection begs to be read on a porch somewhere, somewhere poems call us home, insisting next time, ‘ask for the world.’”
—Lauren K. Carlson, author of Animals I Have Killed
