I first met John Leo in a moldy, subterranean union hall in the more miserable months of early 2017, and I suspect that we were both shameless, unforgivable narcissists then. In spite of our roughly hewn, still emerging personalities, and through the haze of my early twenties, I saw then that John is the type of person who bears his fierceness with stoicism, and with great care, because he saves it and turns it into an earnest type of love.
Before we were friends, we were activists, brought together in that moldy, subterranean union hall by that trait which we share, the outraged animal that uncoils itself and moves people to action in the face of the unacceptable. Now, it is April of 2024, we live six hundred and fifty miles apart, and we still don’t have public universal healthcare. At the time of this writing, an apocalypse rages in Gaza, and democracy has done ever so little to slow its course. Something I’ve always suspected about John is that he sees in himself a violence that he aims to suppress. I recognize it, because I have it too.
These facts, this history, it all comes to the fore when sitting down with This is Not a Place of Honor, from Night Gallery Press. Over the course of 56 brutal, clean pages, John has crafted a symphony in four parts, and it is magnificent. I miss my friend quietly. Some friendships are undulating and robust, and others hum quietly like electrical wire. My friendship with John feels like the latter.
This electrical humming, the type of noise you hear only after the power has already gone out, is pervasive throughout the collection of poems. It reminds me of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Step with me now through this hole in the world, ripped open by those great Promethians.
The cover is perfect - a monochrome image and arial black minimalism never misses, truly. Title, tv-static on a radioactive animal skull, author. It reminds me of Christian Slater’s character in Heathers, and possesses a masculine angst. The title, only slightly esoteric, is a reference to the problem of contemporary designers and communicators.
Nuclear waste will outlast us, whatever “us” may mean. We bury it, the waste. We hide it, and tuck it away, or perhaps we leave it close to a community of undesirables, but we warn people nonetheless not to go near it. It’ll burn you in ways that fire can’t. How do we tell them, our scions, so different from us, to not stray so close to the discarded stalk of fennel we left behind, when our mother tongues rotted and fell away epochs before they arrived?
Some designers advocated for visibly hostile architecture - something spiky, and violent. Others advocated for the same phrase in every language, warnings of every variety. But what to say? This is Not a Place of Honor.
Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting in a darkened theater, and the strings have just finished tuning. A hush falls, before a single cello crescendos an earthy note, until it becomes frenetic and sharp, and the room falls silent again. The War is Ongoing.
John opens with something dismal, something rotting. Stagnation, paralysis, and a feeling of wasted time, the reader is frozen in place in the oncoming headlights. “For years it has been 3:42. I have pulled the page off the calendar and every next page says March.” March, the astrological beginning of spring, named for Martus, the God of War, for March also marks the beginning of warfare season. This introduction sets the stage, and then the curtain pulls up. Look at the stage, the set, the lights. We are told in no uncertain terms that this is a book about domestic paralysis in the presence of incredible violence.
Follow him, the poet, through the doorways he draws. Reflective and disappearing, John takes us to the forge of God, haunted by regret, inventing mayflies, condemning all creation to an eternity of longing. Follow him next to the supermarket, the too-long self-checkout line. It’s maddening, isn’t it? The wasted time?
In the first section of This is Not a Place of Honor, readers are assaulted by the abject misery of living under late stage capitalism. The color black pervades. Virgil, constellations, The Names of Ancient Wars, and the cold fear that sweeps in with Winter, or under a total eclipse are the dominating themes. Although dismal, John puts lyrics to the discordant notes we all live with every day.
“The Vasectomy,” is where I begin to notice again the ways in which John and I are matched and overlapping. The Brass Ring, a place where I once worked, is the setting for a conversation about his vasectomy. I, too, have chosen to zipper my bloodline but kiss animal, to burn not like a flame, but a summer. We have chosen to contain the harm we were born with. John calls it our “American inheritance.” He writes of the Battle of Cannae, the annihilation, the permanent shadows. Invocation of Hiroshima, the rotting feeling while the empire collapses in slow-motion.
Thou mayest.
In Part II, the electric hum of Part I fades into something that sounds more like insects buzzing in early summer. Ninkasi, the Mesopotamian goddess of brewing, takes the reader by the hand and pulls them through the gore and the mud into July, the warmest month, named for Julius Caesar, the beginning of the end of Rome.
Part II has my favorite poem of the collection, “Would You Still Love Me if I Was a Worm?” Of course it’s beautifully written, but most importantly, it’s about my friend, Claire, who is also John’s wife. Claire is beautiful in her own right, but it is her joy that makes her radiant. An absolute Solstice of a person, of course she deserves the happiest poem. I can't help but adore this one poem more than the rest of them, because I can't help but adore my friend. This poem has humor, and it celebrates the person that John and I both love so, so dearly. I cherish this one.
It is here, in this section, that we begin to learn how to live, always with the rot nipping at our heels. Always with the bombs falling, but just over the horizon. We are still in paradise, after all. The coin is in the air, we hold our breath as it hangs, suspended, just before the party ends. This is the season where people like us let the coyotes out, become ringleaders in the circus, and make them all dance. This is the season where glasses get dropped, and shatter on the floor. “This is the month when blood turns to lightning.”
Part III. We’re still dancing. St. Simon Stylites changes pillars, and the antichrist marches towards Rome. The party is ending now. Prophecies of violence become manifest in MKULTRA, the invention of the nuclear bomb. You’re supposed to be afraid. At this arc of the Sun, the light shows us the flaws. Here it is again, the way people like us are “born tangled in the conveyor belt.”
John seems to slow his pace here, lingering a bit on poems about the disposal of nuclear waste, and the short life of Harry Daghlian. We finally get the question, “who shall we be?” This is pivotal in the narrative. Up until this point, the book had a tone of helplessness, the effect of being a bystander, existing in a failed democracy. There is, of course, a taste of agency in the previous mentions of fertility and sexuality, but nothing so straightforward as what we find at this stage of Part III. There is a type of hopefulness here.
Towards the end of Part III it starts to stagger. The hero is wounded, and the music is reaching a crescendo just before the crashing finale. “Going Clear” speaks of the buried things that were meant to kill, “The Sacrifice,” a horny but emotionally distant ensemble, turns towards the future, reflecting on one’s own future absence. Who will remember the poet when he has departed? “The Touch” is an orgasm and a birth in reverse, Kronenbergian. Being okay means “choosing the slow death.” I am familiar with this truth.
“Congratulations, we have arrived upon this marvelous future.” Summer has ended.
In Part IV is where things start to get strange. John breaks apart formatting, and opts for poetry that is narrative and lengthy, at times a parable with “Disaster Preparedness,” before taking another hard, staggering step with “Stalker.” “Disaster Preparedness,” in particular, is unusual. It is the longest poem in the collection, and the only one that seems to tell a “traditional” story. A couple prepares well for the apocalypse, and the bunker works perfectly while the bombs rain down overhead. The poet can spend the rest of his life underground with the love of his life.
But they leave. They exit the bunker, searching for their old lives in the wasteland. Wouldn’t you?
The ground shakes, and the surreal takes hold. Hang on while we ride the creation myth in reverse, aware now that the simulation is breaking. In Part IV, memory begins to slip into misremembering and disremembering. War breaks men apart from their families, begetting legends and collective memory, and the terrible loneliness.
Zoom out. In “Blood Line,” John writes of that “futureproof contagion.” He writes, “In Hell they have learned to kill the future, until each sinner fades to genetic echo.” This line grips me. The knot forms in my stomach, like hearing intense new music a handful of miles into a marathon. We have sealed our own fates. This poem feels like an Edward Hopper painting, scaled to the cosmos. You can look upon that perfect blue marble, but you cannot ever touch it. Forever distant, I only want what I can’t have. The music soars, reaching a climax, and then? Exhale.
“The Lines Were Whispered to the Actors,” another longer form poem, refocusing the work back into a theatrical mode. The audience remembers where they are. The poet is looking again towards the future, the one without him in it. The one without Claire. Film as a memory and memory as film, “playing long after the theater of the living has burned.”
Quieter still, “Marginalia” releases the grip. “Escape Velocity,” the poem that finally made me cry. “We used to be unhappy,” he writes, but we aren’t anymore. Hold the dear things close, and love so deeply. This is a poem about our friends. This is a poem about being loved back, and seeing it vividly. This is the poem where it all harmonizes - this is how we will live. We will go on forever and we will never touch, and it will be so, so beautiful.
It’s almost a whisper now, this music. “Solaris,” the spool of thread runs out. “Death opens like a mouth,” and the universe is swallowed whole. The singular note fades out.
Black page. Curtain drops. You know how the story ends.
In my notebook, there is a pause in the middle of Part III - a break from my notes for this review. It’s a journal entry dated April 9, 1:35 AM. In it I write of my own destructive tendencies, one action still fresh - the ill-advised joining of bodies with someone I had resolved not to touch. “Lately I am frightening.” It is here that I begin to wonder if John knows that I have it, too, the violent thing he writes of, the one that makes us feel dangerous.
I write of the eclipse, of ephemerality, of the new type of love I’m feeling that I cannot name. I write of grocery shopping with my best friend, and of the dead girl watching the Sun black out through my eyes, and of the woman I would go on to destroy without any remorse. I spill it all out here, in this break, torn open by the poetry.
I write of the fact that every April 13, for the rest of my life, I will be reminded that it only hurts because it matters. The grief tells me that I am alive. Cooking dinner, surrounded by the people who love me back, our laughter must have sounded like screaming.
I write of being in love with a dying world. The eclipse, that moment where we all stood in the shadow of an old god, happened under the sign of Aries, the god of war, and the Sun sign of my beloved old friend, John Leo.
It is such an intimate thing, to read another person’s poetry. All of a sudden this tall, quiet man is transformed from my older brother into a sword that can speak. In these pages there is sexuality, fear, and grief. But there is also that old fierceness, carefully handled for all its molten strength, powering that great engine which turns everything it touches electric, and kind. How lucky I am to love something so brilliant, and to be able to stand so close, to be able to withstand the heat.
This is Not a Place of Honor is a book about violence, yes, but it is also a book about choice. It is a book about staring down the barrel of a gun that we all helped build, and choosing to hold tightly onto the people we love all the while. The book is grisly, difficult, and loaded, informed by cinema, music, and history. John places himself in the river of time, looking backwards to Hannibal, Caesar, and Oppenheimer, before averting his gaze. He turns his body to look downstream, where it flows out of sight. He passes us the binoculars, so we can watch, too. Such is his kindness.
The release party for This is Not a Place of Honor is April 27 at Cafe Mustache (Chicago), and I hope to see you there. The official release is May 15. Copies are available via John (@sorrowfulgroanings on Instagram) at in-person events and via Night Gallery (@enterthenightgallery). More inquiries can be directed to enterthenightgallery@gmail.com.
Thanks for being here.
