angel falls

From Appalachian poet and memoirist Cheyanne Leonardo comes her second poetry collection, angel falls. This collection is both a love letter and a eulogy: it holds many moments of gratitude for our earthly life and endeavors to look beyond it through thoughtful exploration and unfettered imagination. The context for it all is the book's title - angel falls - which is a place as well as a concept.

First of all, Angel Falls is a real place. It is the ghost of a split-stream waterfall in the Big South Fork that was blasted with dynamite in 1954 to better accommodate boating and fishing. Now it's a river rapid that causes confusion for hikers (expecting to arrive at the non-existent, hallowed falls) and extreme danger for kayakers and canoers (paddling downstream and navigating the perilous rock formation left behind).

But angel falls becomes a concept as soon as we shift our focus on the word "falls" from noun to verb. An angel falling. A fallen angel. What does such an image conjure, in this particular place and time? At least, within these pages, it is a celebration of the divine beauty we can perceive in this world and an attempt to accept that so many of our deepest questions will remain unanswered until we leave it. In the meantime, we love each other. And we try to understand our purpose here together.

To make sense of all the love and loss around her and how the two begin to overlap, Cheyanne looks for answers in nature, literature, spirituality, mythology, and her small town in Scott County, Tennessee. What she finds, she renders in poetry, weaving both clues and comfort into each poem for other searching souls to discover on their own journeys through place and time.