Returning the Sword to the Stone - by Mark Leidner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The followup to his beloved debut collection Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone is simultaneously profound and irreverent, in the same way that the world is flat as we walk and round as we live. "A child surprised that a neon sign / isn't hot the first time they touch one / knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one's goals" states the speaker of "Youth Is A Fugitive" and this sentiment is one of the central precepts of Returning the Sword to the Stone. Congealing directly off the page, these are poems that only Mark Leidner could have written.

Review Quotes

"Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone is not exactly a book of renouncement, as the title might suggest. Rather, these poems enact comic and insightful reversals. The book teases us by suggesting that, perhaps counterintuitively, one task of the contemporary poet is to reverse mythologies - for example, of origin, kingship, kinship, lineage, and privilege. These poems swerve and backtrack in wild, often uproarious procedures, and it's a testament to Leidner that he's able to perform them in such a way that they don't become self-indulgent. He tiptoes a line between joyful goofiness and stunning lyricism."--Nathan Hoks "Hong Kong Review of Books"

"A poem can follow us into our days as a sort of spell. Leidner knows this miracle--magic and generously retrieves objects from the curio shelf in his mind of essential observation. Like well-loved (kitsch) items sketch a memento mori of a life investigated, we can, through these poems, look into this era of our disaffected partisan nation with pathos and humour. In a time of fear and love, these poems re-collect parts of ourselves we may not have picked up to look at for some time."--Suchi J. Pritchard "Cleveland Review of Books"

"I have always felt, ever since I first encountered Mark Leidner's work, that there's an element of a beautiful, fallen choirboy speaker, sardonic and spiritually cynical--yet still secure in his own privileged relationship with the divine. In fact, there is something about Leidner's poetry that sounds as if it is a PowerPoint presentation to God after our own self-inflicted apocalypse...The tragic human insight of his lines are cloaked in hilarity, presented like answers to the implied question: so, what was it like being human?"--Bianca Stone "The Brooklyn Rail"

"Leidner is a comic genius, which is to say this book is both hilarious and profound. Every time I have attempted to read 'I'm Running for President' out loud, I have cried laughing... But then there are also lines like this: 'Life is long for a brief time/then brief for a long time.'"--Elisa Gabbert "The New York Times-Best of Poetry 2021"

"Reading a poem out of Mark Leidner's Returning The Sword To The Stone, is, in some sense, akin to experiencing the last light of the sun as it gives way to a moonless night sky hundreds of miles off from any human infrastructure. Musings, clauses, and associations pop up on the page as if sidereal mists and glimmering constellations, register briefly as singular sources of energy, and then expand infinitely into pointillist latticeworks of illumination and incandescence that, not unlike a long good look at the stars, leave you fist with the quandary of whether to laugh or cry, and then with a hunch that maybe the truest-to-life answer is that it's not such a profound quandary after all."--John Goodhue "Poetry Northwest"

"Reading Mark Leidner will make you believe that humor is the most powerful poetic tool. Of course, almost no poets--almost no people--are as funny as Leidner, so you should probably just appreciate the poems in front of you instead of trying to make any grand proclamations about what other poems should be. This is how I felt when reading Returning the Sword to the Stone--grateful for a book so of itself, in which the humor doesn't deflect truth, it refracts it."--Emily Temple "Literary Hub"

About the Author

Mark Leidner is the author of two feature films: the sci-fi noir Empathy, Inc. (2019) and the relationship comedy Jammed (2014). He is also the author of the story collection Under the Sea (Tyrant Books, 2018), the poetry collection Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me (Factory Hollow, 2011), and the book of aphorisms The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator, 2011).