more than metaphor

From emerging writer Cheyanne Leonardo comes her debut poetry collection, more than metaphor. Cheyanne wrote this collection over a period of several months after moving back home to Scott County, Tennessee, from Stuttgart, Germany, in the middle of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Upon returning home at the end of August 2020, poetry quickly became her only outlet to make sense of everything she was going through in a way that felt honest and real. Why did she confront such a strong desire to come home at this particular moment in time? What was it like to come back to a place that held so many memories, both treasured and painful? Who - or what - pulled her back into the fold of her little hometown, and what was waiting for her when she got there? How did her imagination both reflect and shape the emotional experience? 

Word by word, Cheyanne uses poetry to build entire worlds, and she discovers another kind of truth along the way - one that becomes meaningful and sometimes even magical. more than metaphor captures a journey of homecoming, of returning to a place she never really left behind and using the power of words to explore all that such an odyssey entails. Highlighting themes of love and romantic hyperbole, memory, reality vs. fiction, myth-making, travel, identity, language, and the act of writing - Cheyanne creates a portrait of herself as a writer and as a young woman seeking her place in the world.