John Leax | Tabloid News

October 7th, 2008

Tabloid News

John Leax

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One afternoon when poet John Leax was standing in a grocery store checkout queue, a tabloid news headline beckoned: ‘Leaping Turtles Invade US’. As he looked more closely at the accompanying image, two lines sprang into his imagination: Suppose one could believe the tabloid headlines; Suppose the stories under them were true; Leax later wrote that ‘true story’. Then he wrote another. And another. They are all collected in “Tabloid News”. As he wrote, Leax explored two linked impulses that he found in the tabloids: desire and fear. We desire connection to beings other than ourselves. Yet we fear what we do not know-what is alien or different from us. In poems like ‘Baby Born with Antlers’, ‘Dog Makes $60 Million Modelling’ and ‘Duck Hunters Shoot Angel’ Leax grapples with this conflict between desire and fear humorously, chillingly, poignantly and artfully. If you have ever been attracted — or repelled — by a tabloid news headline, these poems are for you.

John Leax — “Jack” to anyone who knows him—is a poet and creative nonfiction writer whose writing has many moods, from irony so dry you could towel off with it to a deep, almost Franciscan sense of nature as guide to the soul. Whether he is writing about being out for a walk in the hills of upstate New York or penning hilariously bizarre poems that riff on the subconscious fantasies embedded in the tabloids, Leax is always a keen observer and a deft commentator. He’s also been something of a pioneer. With only one or two others at his side—Luci Shaw comes to mind—he has worked, quietly but persistently, to promote both the creation and appreciation of serious, challenging, edgy writing from within evangelical institutions. He’s been the thin end of the wedge: the result is an ever-widening openness to real literature from those evangelical institutions. (Is there a medal for achievements like this?) But don’t get the wrong idea: there’s nothing religious about his writing, if you take our meaning. It’s about life, the hard and consoling truths of daily experience. There’s even a political dimension to his writing, never blared, but strongly, prophetically present. Go out walking with Jack Leax: you’ll make a friend for life…Please read more on John Leax here…