About

Based in Utah, Chris Leibow is a contemporary American poet and visual artist working in digital collage and mixed media. Using vintage imagery, texture, and architectural space, his work investigates family memory, interior life, and the strange emotional geography of “home.” His collages and poems invite viewers to sit with ambiguity, humor, and transformation rather than resolution.

Here is my work—poems and visual art, some new, some old, and others uncovered from a decade of digital archaeology,

I’m Chris Leibow. I am a poet and visual artist. I graduated with an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. I am also a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. My writing and collage work have appeared in journals and exhibitions around the world. The past several years were devoted to raising my sons, -and leading the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship.

Returning to creative work has meant rediscovering fragments I left behind years ago—lines, images, textures, half-finished ideas. I’m reminded of the line often attributed to Valéry: a poem is never finished, only abandoned. The same is true of collage; both forms wait patiently for the maker to return.

It feels good to be writing again, and creating new collage pieces alongside the poems.

I hope you enjoy what you find here.

If you’re in the SLC area, you can collect all 10 Mini-Poetry Books.

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Reviews

SLUG MAGAZINE REVIEW OF
She Leaves Me Small Gifts: A Few Love Poems
Self-Released CD
Street: 2011

This collection of poems is cohesive and composed. It is read aloud by a deep, sensual male voice. The voice is accompanied by simple and unobtrusive classic piano and guitar melodies. It tells a story of the experience of relationship. Poetry and art tend to be weird and personal. Nevertheless, it would be a fun CD to put on in the background of a party. See if anyone noticed. Things might start getting a li’l freaky. As I said, a deep, sensual male voice describes various aspects of a relationship. It includes passages such as my personal favorite, “someone is desperately fucking in the room next door …” on Track 9. You never even knew you were into poetry until this CD became your album to fuck by. I started wondering if that deep hum of a voice was enough vibration. Well, I think you get the idea. Stick it in to get off, I say

P. Buchanan, Slug Magazine

“Christopher Leibow’s poems are like lessons in loving. Perhaps they ought to be required for all would be ‘lovers’”

Buffalo 47

“As Kundera wrote, “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” The poet Christopher Leibow is in love. The series of lyric loveliness here is infinite, all so crisply defined. And then set free. The phrasing does not just work here, it plays.”

Joe Ivory Mattingly What is Poetry Now

“Christopher Leibow is among the poets that make us see the cracks in the American culture. He, unconditionally, shares with us his enormous capacity for compassion and love in his poems. Christopher brings back news of what the world is.”

Hector Ahumada author of  Earth and Air Poems and The Highland Travelers/Los VIajeros del Altiplano.

On Haiku

” A haiku must be very simple. It should be free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture. It should be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorale.” Jack Kerouac wrote this, and that is exactly what c.a. leibow accomplishes with his refreshingly simple and accessible poems that jog the imagination. His poems are simple, sweet, and accomplish exactly what Kerouac theorized-paint a tiny picture in one’s psyche.

Hattie MacLeod, City Weekly

a few online publications

The power of poetry

Nano fiction

map literary

cha: An asian literary journal

of love and war