A Registry of Omens

Author's NoteLearn how to defeat malicious fae, sing to the capelobo, protect your loved ones from the snallygast, consider the remains of anthropodermic bibliopegy, and make a call on the wind phone. Drawing from folklore and fact, archaeology and maps, and a life spent in forests and libraries alike, A Registry of Omens offers poems, songs, and a monodrama inspired by the supernatural and macabre from around our world and beyond. Clip into your climbing ropes, set your deadman anchor, and follow me.Kendra P. LeonardSeptember 2024Readers SayAs someone raised in the 1970s, I have an insatiable desire for anything involving Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, La Llorona, or the Honey Island Swamp Creature. Spending so many hours of my life watching “In Search Of” movies has made me realize what we’re all looking for in these cryptids, what we are hoping to find, is unbridled proof of the unknown, something to put our own existence into context.Page by page, Kendra Preston Leonard’s new collection of poetry, A Registry of Omens, offers that very same hope. Whether it’s the Capelogo, the Gloucester Serpent, Goliath Buck, or a fabled book bound with human skin, Leonard’s gift to us in these poems is the joy of mystery, of possibilities, and the rage of ghosts needing our memories to hold on to some slice of this life. I couldn’t have more appreciation for this poet, or for the opportunity this collection gives me to dance with banshees in the garden.Dr. Jack B. Bedell, Ghost Forest, Poet Laureate of Louisiana (2017 - 2019)About the AuthorKendra Preston Leonard writes about music, movies, gorgons, werewolves, Shakespeare, feminism, nature, ghosts, disability, drama, race, paleontologists, and much more.Her first chapbook, Making Mythology, was published in 2020 by Louisiana Literature Press.Protectress – a sequel to the Medusa myth – was published by Unsolicited Press in 2022.Red Ogre Review published GRAB, a collection of dark fantasy poetry, as part of its 2023 Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association grant series.Trained as a musicologist, she has written numerous scholarly books in addition to poetry, plays, lyrics, and libretti.About the ArtistMatthew Fertel is an abstract photographer who seeks out beauty in the mundane. He was a fine art auction house catalog photographer in San Francisco for over ten years and currently works in the Photography Department at Sierra College.PublisherPublished by Red Ogre Review and Liquid Raven Media via a grant from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association under the fiscal sponsorship of Independent Arts & Media.Rev. 8-20-2024