Skeletons
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Witty and glam, Skeletons is a prismatic collection which shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humor and intimacy.
Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau’s dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied with loneliness and mortality, Skeletons flashes with prismatic effect across the persistent allure of the flesh. Initiated during Brooklyn’s early lockdown, the book reflects the increasingly troubling simultaneity of Eros and Thanatos, and the discontents of our virtual lives amidst the threats of a pandemic and corrosive politics. Spring blooms relentlessly while the ambulances siren by. Against the mounting pressure that propels the acrostic “Skeletons,” a series of interstitial companion poems titled “Flesh” negotiate intimacy and desire. The collection culminates in an ecstatic sequence celebrating the love and connection that persist despite our fraught present moment. Shrugging off her own anxiety and disillusionment with characteristic humor and pitch-perfect cadence, Landau finds levity in pyrotechnic lines, sonic play, and a wholly original language, asking: “Any way outta this bag of bones?”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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: mortality inching ever closer. The fixed starting letters, especially the less common k and o, free and challenge Landau, and some of her best and most playful moments spring from these beginnings, as words like kabbalah, klutzes, ogling, and oy vey find their way into the poet's lexicon. The "Skeleton" acrostics are particularly powerful when Landau's idiomatic language is applied to surprising referents. For example, describing pregnancy, Landau addresses her body parts directly: "Bye-bye, ankles. Nice knowing you, feet." Another poem opens, "Summer dark found us binge-watching the Perseid," her repurposing of streaming lingo toward the natural world uncomfortably revealing how modern viewers take in content of all kinds. Interspersed between the "Skeleton" acrostics are several poems titled "Flesh," which have a tone that feels less fragmented and more direct, as when Landau writes, "Will we ever run out of days? Who cares to count./ To say there are maybe thirty more Christmases,/ if we're lucky, thirty more Julys." These poems unfurl a resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality.
