Advanced praise:

“Leigh Lucas transmits the lasting shockwaves of grief: the anger and bitterness, blame and shame, its landsickness, and the empty shapes into which we accumulate the things left, inside the private rooms we build around the negative space grief leaves in our lives. The memories called up again and again, involuntary, changing shape each time, words once spoken replaced with new words, drawing us both closer and farther away from who and what we miss. These poems are falling apart for love, are devastatingly honest, naked, bleeding, and brutally self-searching. I'll think about them forever.”—Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star


“A child’s hand in a fat grip on a fat crayon, puncturing crêpe paper” is how our speaker describes their poems. But our speaker is cataclysmically clever, and while these poems tolerate no fragile surface, their majesty far exceeds this devastating premise, allowing us into the private sacrifices a woman makes to protect the life that follows the death of the beloved. Never alone, and certainly never entirely defeated, Leigh Lucas renders the defiance, doubt, and ambition required to go on in grief with tenderheartedness and venom, humor hewn from absurdity and a sharpness of mind. Lucas reaches for complete transformation, gasping her new life with all that poetry empowers, and is most impressively real when everything fails. "The world will be unsettled,” our poet observes. “I will unsettle them.”—Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

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LANDSICKNESS

Tupelo Press, 2024

Order: ✨here✨



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