Nathaniel Rosenthalis’ The Leniad is a mesmerizing, romantic, and surreal collection of poems. Rosenthalis writes with the care of the maker of the universe, turning everything over from the world’s tallest mountains to the smallest pebble on the beach, always landing on the exact word. Rosenthalis is a poet who “hears the highway is blue in a blur” and listens.
Praise for The Leniad:
“These poems revel in the delight of thinking, of writing, of language, of love, and of being brought down and built back up (like Rome from the ashes of Troy) after a break up. They are nothing short of remarkable, the kind of fun that makes you think.
— Mary Jo Bang, A Film in Which I Play Everyone
This is an exhilarating journey, the frozen past and the grim here-and-now liberated, enlivened by discourse, intercourse, their astonishing offspring, poems both wildly inventive and brainy, erotically charged and heart-breaking. In the hands of the cerebral cortex, heartbreak sparkles.
— Kathryn Davis, Aurelia, Aurélia
“Nathaniel Rosenthalis recalls how gods in antiquity would engineer propitious conditions where men’s desire wanted encouragement. If there is a ledge, a leverage, a favorable light, a volta, a vantage, this poet’s line will find it and savor its glimmer, against loss and caution and the world’s contingency.
— Brian Blanchfield, Proxies
About the author
Nathaniel Rosenthalis (MFA ’16) is the author of The Leniad (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). His debut book of poems, I Won’t Begin Again, won the 2021 Burnside Review Press Book Award, selected by Sommer Browning. His poems have appeared in Granta, The Chicago Review, New American Writing, Lana Turner, The Harvard Advocate, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions and elsewhere. Based in New York City, he teaches writing at NYU and Columbia University and also works as an actor and singer.
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