Review of Chance Born by Mia Leonin

by serafima fedorova, poetry editor

You and Mia Leonin are walking on the beach. The ocean is pulled back like a blanket and you can see small pools filled with seashells and marine life that were left behind. Either its early morning or cloudy. It feels like the discovery of a new world and it could be. Leonin turns to you. She asks you a question that perhaps neither of you know the answer to. Maybe that’s the point.

I was lucky enough to meet Mia Leonin as part of a writing program a few years ago. She mentored a small group of us, all girls from Miami trying to find the right words, and helped us with prompts, brought in books, and braided our hair. Both as a poet and an individual, something about Leonin makes you want to lean in and listen, as if she herself is trying to find the miracle about to unfurl itself on the page. “Florida Story,” a poem from her previous book Unraveling the Bed, opens with: “One night, I mistook you for the sea and fell in.” And suddenly, I am the falling and the water.

Maybe Leonin’s secret is language; the deep appreciation she has for English and Spanish and for their blurred borders, for vowels and things that cannot be translated, for palindromes and names. She crafts personas that weave together the Hispanic and American experience, elegantly exploring stories of family and love through a feminine lens— a meditation on vulnerability and strength that at times could be embodied in the same decisions and rituals. The narrative of “The Artist’s Mother” from Braid embodies trauma, abuse, motivation, and survival. Feminism, race, immigration, and war lie at the core of her writing, but her poems are more than that. While political, they don’t try and make a statement. They simply do.

Chance Born, her latest poetry book, is just as elegant in its wording as her previous work but tackles more difficult point of views and settings. Her persona poems artfully voice pain and loss without becoming a soapbox platform or a way to capitalize on tragedy. Leonin includes, but moves beyond her Hispanic and Midwest origins into the Middle East, where she writes about the violence of Iraq and about the people. She gives her narratives humanity, searching beyond the crime and the victims into their identities and lives beyond, during, and before tragedy. In “Self-Portrait As An Innocent Bystander” she writes: “I try to nuzzle the unknowable, to thaw/the unthinkable loss” and “I’m a useless metaphor maker/a futile reacher beyond the be/ yonder.” Whether the poem is about miners trapped underground after an earthquake, or the mourning of a child’s death because of domestic abuse, or a wish to somehow undo the hardships of a relative’s life, Leonin invites you to face chaos of individual lives and create something beautiful from it. In a world where the names of the dead are wielded for justice and injustice without a thought to the lives behind them, Leonin is a breath of fresh air, breaking through the surface. She moves past everything to the people. She shrugs her shoulders and lets the terrifying thing cupped in her palms slip back into the waters and keeps walking along the shore.

How wondrous people are. How well we forget them.

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