Kent Leatham debuts with poetic dispatches from the struggle of being a 'Modern Man.'

The phrase, the idea of a “modern man,” is incredibly charged—philosophically and culturally— starting with the famous 1933 collection by Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, where the Swiss psychiatrist argued people suffer from a lack of meaning because contemporary culture addresses the mind only through a material lens. 

In his poetic diary/manifesto, Kent Leatham goes even further, concentrating not on the material impact of the mainstream, but on the mainstream ideology he experiences and struggles with while moving through a contemporary society. His debut volume, Modern Man, was published on Thursday, Oct. 1 by Meadowlark Press and is a finalist for the 2026 Birdy Poetry Prize.

Leatham has a book signing event at Untamed Fire, a crystal and creativity shop in Sand City, on Sunday, Oct. 18.

Leatham is poet, translator and educator at CSU Monterey Bay, where he teaches classes such as Poetry and Gender, Multicultural Poetry or Intro to Creative Writing and Social Action.

He also serves as faculty advisor for In the Ords, the CSUMB undergraduate literary-arts journal and curates a local poetry group, Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium. 

Among so many poems that sound provocative on surface but inspire no one, Modern Man reads genuine, almost like diary entries of a natural born poet.

With concepts of masculinity and generational change in mind, a figure of a father plays the central, organizing role in the collection. Until later on in the volume, the poems all open with the phrase “dear Dad,” where the lyrical subject, an orphan (?), white and circumcised, is looking for a mentor and seeks advice on all the pains of modernity, even if he suspects that perhaps “the father” can’t be the mentor because of the sins of his generations: chauvinism, sexism, racism, xenophobia. 

Reading Modern Man, we are all orphans, in the sense of being lost in contemporary America when the American dream was long proclaimed a lie, left with Reddit, AI and pop culture, and unresolved, unreckoned history. 

From the second poem in the collection:

"We don’t talk much these days.

"Americans, I mean, with other Americans

"on the other sides of Americahood.

"Sure, we gather at canyons a lot

"and holler out over the drop,

"and sometimes voices come bouncing back,

"but mostly they’re just shreds of our own." 

The lyrical subject is trying to be” less American;” his quest for a father is a quest for a new story with which the United States can redeem itself and update its identity, by for example, reckoning which the fact that cute coastal towns were scenes of arsons when the white community wanted to get rid of its Chinese members.  

The volume is packed with ample quotes (1992 anthology Men of Our Time) and cultural references, from Big Lebowski, through Viktor Frankl to trans poet Zoe Tuck. Local artist Paul Richmond designed the cover art.

Leatham has a book signing event at 1pm in Untamed Fire in Sand City on Sunday, Oct. 18 at 1pm, and a featured poetry reading at Old Capitol Books in Monterey at 6:30pm on Friday, Oct. 23. On Sunday, Dec. 6, 4-6pm, Leatham will speak and read his poems at the CSUMB campus, within the Writers from the Edge series. This event takes place in the Tanimura & Antle Library (Building 508, Room 1188) at the CSUMB campus. 

Buy the book at Bookworks in Pacific Grove, River House Books in Carmel and Untamed Fire in Sand City, or online at meadowlarkbookstore.com. To learn more about the poet, visit kentleatham.weebly.com.