Flesh
To be afraid of every edge, the falling off of it.Walking at night. Walking under the scaffolding,passing the spot where the kid lost his phone at gunpoint,where my daughter while walking to school past the trashand daffodils was actually in the moment truly happy.How mildly the days go by and againthe small cove, after the workday, of going home.This day. The next. The great lengths we went to savethe wild turkeys last summer, how the traffic stopped for themwhile the factory farms fed each and every chickchick chick chick chick into the chipper.
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- February 6, 2024
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“Flesh” from SKELETONS: by Deborah Landau.
Published by Copper Canyon Press on April 4, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Deborah Landau.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jacqueline Mia Foster
Deborah Landau is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Skeletons, which was named on of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023”. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Believer Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, APR, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and three editions of The Best American Poetry. She is a Professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program, and she lives in Brooklyn.
“Landau’s earthy, angsty poems—about sex and mortality and cosmic despair—are insistently quotable, and more fun than they have any right to be.”
—New York Times
“By turns melancholy and exuberant, but always fuelled by formal and sonic play, this collection—structured around a sequence of ‘Skeleton’ acrostics, punctuated by a series of ‘Flesh’ interludes—measures the fact of mortality against the pleasures and possibilities of being alive.”
—New Yorker, Best Books 2023
“Throughout this collection, Landau’s stereoscopic vision splits: one eye stares into the void; the other stays trained on the luxuries that embodiment allows and mortality quickens. This double sense of life-in-death manifests in nearly every poem. . . . These poems are conversational memento mori, sprinkled with chatty, O’Haraesque bursts right out the gate: ‘Sorry not sorry, said death.’ The voice is delightfully propulsive—and compulsive—as it works against the potential monolith of the acrostic form. The surprising line breaks and enjambment teeter asymmetrically to exhilarating effect.”
—Lara Glenum, Poetry Foundation
“In her shining fifth collection (after Soft Targets), Landau chooses the somewhat unexpected acrostic form as a container for her punchy riffs on modern life. Spelling ‘skeleton’ down the left margin, these poems wield a lightness of tone with subject matter that has preoccupied her across several books. . . . These poems unfurl a resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Landau’s way with a line is exquisite. Spacing, lineation, and ellipsis regulate the rush or slow drip of the words, pacing our reading with the poet’s thinking. Often, the form deprives readers of expected grammatical handholds, so we slide into the eye of the poem and her lush language. Most striking is the mouthfeel of the poems, whether arid or salivating, as in a poem about cherries: ‘louche juice, farm to mouth, the sweetest cerise mess.’ Skeletons is clever, pragmatic, and, finally, ecstatic about ‘this bag of bones’ we’re bound to.”
—Barbara Engel, Booklist
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