LANDSICKNESS

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Selected by Chen Chen for the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize from Tupelo Press:

“Landsickness names and navigates a shattering grief in every possible way: through the pulse, via the intellect, from the shivering body and all its sweaters, over land, underwater, in the leaky vastness of night, in suffocating day, in a therapist’s questions, with rage and somehow humor, too. I could not stop reading this collection. Its candor startles. Its speaker seems to hold nothing back about how ungraceful, how ugly the grieving has been and is. Though of course it takes tremendous craft (grace) to sustain, vary, and expand such an effect for an entire (beautiful) work. Such a gift, these spacious pages, this space in which any feeling, however unruly, can walk through and receive the honor of vibrating attention. I mean—this is love. Read it now.” — Chen Chen 

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Reviewed by The Poetry Foundation:

In Leigh Lucas’s startling chapbook, Landsickness, “Nights // Are each the same” as the speaker “lie[s] in bed and stare[s] into the messy monuments in search of signs from the beyond.” These “monuments” are precious objects belonging to a lover who died of suicide: “Shrines of his photographs, trinkets, and scraps of his handwriting form on my windowsills […] like birds’ nests.”

Lucas’s poems possess a tender vulnerability in their attempt to make sense of a world transformed in the aftermath of loss, when even “[w]alking the streets takes extreme effort,” when a dead phone leaves the speaker feeling “desperately lost.”

The poems in this book are untitled, giving the impression of one long poem with significant pauses that allow readers to focus on the speaker’s memories of her lover, and her reflections about his suicide:

What happens to a body thrown?

Some believe numbers govern splashes:

A high Reynolds number makes them tall; a high Weber
number makes them messy.

I appreciate attempts to lasso a slippery world, to number,
measure, and taxonomize.

The list-like quality of these lines, as well as the mention of Reynolds and Weber numbers—both related to fluid mechanics and dynamics—suggest ways of trying to understand and explain something that defies comprehension. At the same time, these lines serve as containers for the range of emotions experienced by the speaker.

In Landsickness, speculation and reality are not in opposition to each other, but rather offer different perceptions of the same event—

I seasick between: I knew this would  
happen (rock). And, how could it have (rock). Between: I knew
him as well as I could know someone. And, I didn’t know him  
at all. (Rock, rock.)

Reviewed By Leonora Simonovis