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# Striding Towards Surety and Simplicity. Book Review: Lang Leav's "Soon It Will Be Sunday"
- URL: https://www.fsm.ink/striding-towards-surety-and-simplicity-book-review-lang-leavs-soon-it-will-be-sunday/
- Published: 2026-09-23T13:36:04.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T13:36:04.000Z
- Author: Blair Vandehey
- Tags: Books & Literature

*by Blair E Vandehey*

For the art consumer, there is perhaps no greater pleasure than bearing witness to a creator’s growth throughout their discography, bibliography, or whichever sequence. Poet [Lang Leav](https://www.langleav.com/?ref=fsm.ink) begins most evidently to take those stylistic steps forward (while not sacrificing her calling cards) in her most recent collection [***Soon It Will Be Sunday***](https://bookshop.org/p/books/soon-it-will-be-sunday-lang-leav/6a2a38d71c2cfcd8?ean=9798881600112&affiliate=1688&ref=fsm.ink), be it in subject matter or her voice as both an author and a person.

Leav opens *Sunday* immediately with this more mature voice, contoured by a growing comfort within herself as a complex human being with limited knowledge and the grace she’s withheld from herself in her work up until now. It is in this evolved voice where she continues to ground herself, the echoes of trepidation hanging onto her words treated with an understanding little seen from her before. In her other collections, the poet often gets stuck in her own ruminations not at a standstill but in a chaotic spiral. In this one, however, a new Leav at greater ease within herself, if somewhat resigned, begins walking alongside her many versions of herself and the ghosts lingering in her story. The questions that Leav poses remain unanswered, for she now knows that they will never be answered, but despite that, she will not mourn them too long, for there is far too much ground left to cover. Leav, then, accepts (if reluctantly) their company as she continues unfalteringly forward with a footing–though uneven at times–and a momentum characterizing the poet’s personal and authorial growth.

Often, poetry is written as a means to an end, perhaps through extended metaphor, between-the-lines motif, or other figurative hints at some bigger message the words are merely messengers of, rather than something to be appreciated as is. However, *Sunday* subverts this convention by turning the means into the ends in themselves; the moment is the moral, and the lyric the lesson. It is perhaps only the “unexpected beauty” of a battered mānuka tree and its strength, the ylang-ylang she offered the Balinese sun god, and her old dog’s late afternoon patterns, for Leav asserts it is these moments themselves, not whatever they might have otherwise stood in for, that Leav wishes to share with her readers and where *Sunday* builds its profound simplicity; these past experiences are nothing more than moments she had the privilege of living, and that alone to this new Leav makes them worth sharing.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b7/d1/b7d1b6d1-443f-4e09-b301-d344accb0bbe/content/images/2026/09/71wc8OVuYmL._SL1500_.jpg)

"Soon It Will Be Sunday." Lang Leav. Andrews McMeel Publishing. 160 pp. Pub: Oct 14, 2025

This review would not be complete without lengthy acknowledgement of Leav’s increasingly bare reckonings with her parents’ experiences as Cambodian refugees, which make up some of the most poignant works in *Sunday* and further attest to her new willingness to meet her past where it stands, as it stands. “The Ocean Never Stops Asking” compresses space and time (a very Leavian move) between the water surrounding her father’s childhood bamboo-stilted home and a popular Australian beachfront the poet frequented in her younger days, placing the two on shores just opposite to one another. However, the next page reveals this image of her father’s idyll juxtaposed with her carefreeness is far deeper than it first appears. The poet deviates from her typical enigmatic writing style by providing a micro-essay in which she explains that the Khmer Rouge destroyed most photographs of her parents’ lives before the war, but her father would always tell her the story of the Mekong River bringing the water–and, to him, all the magic it carried–up to his home each year without fail. This poem, then, becomes a way that Leav reclaims the long-lost idyll the regime thought it destroyed for her father and a way Leav reaches out for a past she never knew but carries as his second-generation immigrant daughter. Later in *Sunday*, however, Leav lets her heart bleed in grieving lost memory in the harrowing antithetical poem “A Letter to My Mother at Immigration.” She reflects on the silences her mother endured, such as answering to a new Anglicized name, loving her daughter on the other side of a language barrier, to ensure a good life for Leav, and how she could never fully connect with her mother as the person she truly was due to these many trenches between a woman of a (stolen) world and a native-born daughter. At the poem’s closing, Leav stands again on the shore and for the first time mourns her failure to have seen her mother and her world, left with only empty guesses at what each sacrifice cost her. Through the poem’s rawness, the reader is left just as devastated as Leav.

Everything that Leav proves she can be in *Soon It Will Be Sunday*, the testament to both her writerly and individual evolution, leaves me wondering just what she might show the world next, slowly but surely.

> Blair E. Vandehey is an Appleton-based writer, daydreamer, and lover al all things pop culture. She is currently working towards degree in Creative Writing and Political Science at Lawrence University.