About Modern Man:
Finalist of the 2026 Birdy Poetry PrizeIf you could say anything to a parent you’d never met, where would you start? How about “Dear Dad . . .”Kent Leatham’s Modern Man offers an intimate outreach to the author’s anonymous sperm-donor father: a ghost whose absence represents the best and worst of contemporary masculinity. Combining wry humor and raw grief, and with references ranging from Reddit and Rob Zombie to Shakespeare’s sonnets and the Song of Songs, these poems deconstruct toxic gender tropes while lamenting the traumas inflicted on those expected to “take it like a man.”
Leatham is a new queer voice: a nonbinary Millennial, conceived in the early days of assisted-reproduction technology, raised amidst mass shootings and persistent LGBTQIA+ persecution, and witness to the violent writhings of the patriarchy’s dying empire. “I wonder what you would most have wished / for me to learn,” their unknowable father is asked, “that you still hold as self-evident / if when I was a dependent / little pink American boy / you’d been there?”
About the Author:
Praise for Modern Man:
Kent Leatham’s Modern Man is a marvel. Here, to be a donor-conceived person is to be born into a life of questions and wonder, impacted by family and memory, known and unknown. What a gorgeous, lyric sincerity in the “Dear Dad” poems. I love this book.
—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Gunpowder Press, 2024)
Modern Man is dedicated to Kent Leatham’s parents “who never met.” Immediately, we are in uncharted territory, and we find our bearings in a series of “Dear Dad” poems in which Leatham questions and speculates on every possible facet of a donor/father’s place in the world and in a family. This investigation is often wry and more often heartbreaking: “Would you keep the cat in? / Would you wall the swallows out?” Leatham’s epistolary structure is perfect for conveying longing. The book’s second section balances out the personal with the worldly, incorporating texts of all kinds and riffing on the meanings of crush and closet. Only a poet with full command of their craft could deliver poems of such clarity, compassion, and power. Modern Man is the work of an artist of the first order.
—John Skoyles, poetry editor emeritus of Ploughshares, executive director emeritus of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, author of That’s Where You Come In (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2026)
Kent Leatham’s debut collection, Modern Man, is an interrogation of the self in a world of anonymity. The poems mimic our culture of silence and separation, beginning and ending in the same place: by themselves. Wondering. Confessing. Like each generation’s obliviousness to the lives and lifestyles of their own kin. Is an anonymous man’s ejaculation for cash the same as being a father? Buried in this universe are questions even someone with a known, breathing dad wouldn’t ask, and yet they spark endless possibilities and poetic pleasures: did he just need cash, is he a doctor? Is a donor also a donut? Is the guy who didn’t pick up his dog’s poop my father? Is he also queer? In the end, I ask: how does a person who is also a poet find their origins when they are half erased? Modern Man is a testament to parenthood by poetic mimesis: Plath, Bly, Glück, and the ocean of other writers whose fatherly slime has pulsed this stunning collection’s DNA. Honestly, who needs a bloodline when “. . . a child [is] / but a failed / scheme to rhyme”?
—Rachelle Escamilla, Monterey County Poet Laureate emerita, author of Space Junk from the Heavenly Palace (Nomadic Press, 2023)
Kent Leatham’s poetry is buzzing with incitements and emotional bravado: part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, part epistolary conversation with someone who will never answer. Leatham asks what we inherit beyond DNA, whether identity can be chosen as much as received, and what it means to build a self from stories, archives, and absence. Along the way, Audubon, Viktor Frankl, Frankenstein, Reddit, Sylvia Plath, George Michael, and family genealogy become unlikely companions in a work that is at once politically alert and deeply humane. Modern Man reminds us that every search for a father is also a search for a language adequate to the mystery of belonging.
—Peter Jay Shippy, author of Kaputniks (Saturnalia Books, 2021)
In this extraordinarily rich and surprising collection, Kent Leatham begins with a series of poems to the sperm-donor father they never met. “Where are you, Dad? / What’s under your feet? // What would you say to somebody who believes / whole groups of people aren’t worth the light?” In part two, the book brings the reader stories: discarded foreskins on a sightseeing trip around Boston, a deep dive into death by crushing, a long poem about closets, and a black-and-white movie with ghosts and dinosaurs. There are also elegies to victims of war and mass shootings, including an extraordinary piece using partial lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets to eulogize the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. A superb and impressive collection!
—Lee Desrosiers, author of Pocketing the Light (Kelsay Books, 2026)
Kent Leatham’s Modern Man is an unflinching, ambitious, extraordinarily haunting book from a brilliant young poet who dares to explore new psychic terrain for the reader. The subject matter initially probes Leatham’s unknown sperm-donor father with inquiry, candor, and heartbreaking vulnerability. Leatham also grapples with a plethora of existential questions about their place of belonging in the world. These brave inquiries hang in the silence, giving us all reason to question our own terrain. Modern Man is learned work, filled with bold allusions that effortlessly weave throughout, reminiscent of masters like Bidart and Eliot. In the book’s concluding poem, “Three from the Anthropocene,” Leatham aptly describes “these words, this language, / this need for critical self-reflection, // this capacity for locating myself in time, / this yearning for a different outcome, // this discomfort with inadequacy, / this frustration, this shame, // this demand to be heard . . .” And this is poetry that demands to be heard, for it will surely benefit us to listen, and listen deeply.
—Leonore Wilson, Napa Valley Poet Laureate emerita, author of Tremendum, Augustum (Kelsay Books, 2014)
