Reconsidering Place and Identity: Mia Leonin's Chance Born
by Chelsea Dingman
“I am the one-eyed wolf staring from your bluffs, the quarry in your limestone, I am the chance born,” the speaker of Mia Leonin’s forthcoming collection Chance Born (Anhinga Press April 2016) boldly states as a refusal to be defined by place or birth, by lineage or ancestry. This defiance is explored throughout Leonin’s collection as she explores what it is to exist between cultures, as well as how the places we inhabit inform who we become, how we speak, and how we become extensions of experience. Her poems are a comment on motherhood and childhood, on being a daughter to a mother and an absent father, what it is to be a citizen of this country, and on death and what must be endured in times of war and strife. In “Refugee,” Leonin’s speaker states, “Daughter, your mother’s prayer would sharpen/and shred your opaque sack of sleep./She would chew you into her cow-belly vault, break you/into one of the earth’s invisible compounds with her rumen/if she could live to see what you will survive.” Using strong narratives, Leonin constructs a world that is torn, akin to the way a mother is torn by watching her children grow into themselves in this same world.
Though she masterfully uses lyrical language, image and sound, and the page to unsettle the reader, she also uses powerful narratives to expertly convey the speaker’s human experience. Each section has its own focus on certain dichotomies: cultural, familial, female/male, nature vs. nurture. Through narratives built around Miami, Missouri, Baghdad, and Cuba, Leonin uses metaphor to answer questions as to identity also. Beginning with the birth of the speaker’s child, through her mother’s death and the absence of her father, Leonin deftly uses language to construct the branches and roots of a fascinating family tree. She further explores some of the more recent newsworthy racial experiences that are tied to both place and identity. The speaker lives between Miami and Missouri for much of the collection, where “belonging means you no longer think of it.” Where Michael Brown died and she became a mother. Where her father went missing and she was identified by race and gender, before she was a mother. Where her daughter will also be subject to these restrictions or freedoms. It is a fantastic collection that speaks to what it is to be female, aging, born of dissimilar parents and cultural backgrounds, and yet a citizen of the current cultural climate.
Before Chance Born, Mia Leonin authored two books of poetry: Braid (Anhinga Press) and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press). She also published a memoir called Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). She has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in New Letters, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, and Chelsea, among others. She has received a Money for Women Grant by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and a 2005 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Leonin has been writing about theater, dance, and performance in Miami since 2000. She was the theater critic for the Miami New Times and is the recipient of a Green Eyeshade Award for theater criticism. She frequently writes about dance, performance, and Spanish-language theater for the Miami Herald. In 2007, she was selected to be a fellow in the National Endowment for the Arts/Annenberg Institute on Theater and Musical Theater. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
Though she masterfully uses lyrical language, image and sound, and the page to unsettle the reader, she also uses powerful narratives to expertly convey the speaker’s human experience. Each section has its own focus on certain dichotomies: cultural, familial, female/male, nature vs. nurture. Through narratives built around Miami, Missouri, Baghdad, and Cuba, Leonin uses metaphor to answer questions as to identity also. Beginning with the birth of the speaker’s child, through her mother’s death and the absence of her father, Leonin deftly uses language to construct the branches and roots of a fascinating family tree. She further explores some of the more recent newsworthy racial experiences that are tied to both place and identity. The speaker lives between Miami and Missouri for much of the collection, where “belonging means you no longer think of it.” Where Michael Brown died and she became a mother. Where her father went missing and she was identified by race and gender, before she was a mother. Where her daughter will also be subject to these restrictions or freedoms. It is a fantastic collection that speaks to what it is to be female, aging, born of dissimilar parents and cultural backgrounds, and yet a citizen of the current cultural climate.
Before Chance Born, Mia Leonin authored two books of poetry: Braid (Anhinga Press) and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press). She also published a memoir called Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). She has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in New Letters, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, and Chelsea, among others. She has received a Money for Women Grant by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and a 2005 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Leonin has been writing about theater, dance, and performance in Miami since 2000. She was the theater critic for the Miami New Times and is the recipient of a Green Eyeshade Award for theater criticism. She frequently writes about dance, performance, and Spanish-language theater for the Miami Herald. In 2007, she was selected to be a fellow in the National Endowment for the Arts/Annenberg Institute on Theater and Musical Theater. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
