Landsickness
by Leigh Lucas
$14.95
WINNER OF THE
SUNKEN GARDEN CHAPBOOK PRIZE
SELECTED BY CHEN CHEN
Landsickness is an intimate narrative poem that chronicles a young woman’s loss of a former boyfriend to suicide. The heartfelt and darkly humorous elegy begins just days after the beloved’s death and follows the speaker’s experience of early grief while she avoids friends, behaves badly at work, and wanders the streets of New York, both denying and attempting to make sense of her new reality. She contemplates and studies water movement, splashes, and the physics of falls to begin to process her grief, reconstruct memories of the man she lost, and learn to live a life absurd yet still precious without him.
Format: chapbook
Published: June 2024
Out of stock
“Submerge in grief and risk being sunk by grief,” writes Leigh Lucas, and Landsickness is a book that emerges from that submersion, from that sinking. This is a haunting and crushing work of Art that tries to make sense of being alive and living with loss. It is its own kind of submersion, delivered by an author who can skillfully guide the reader back to the surface.
—Matthew Olzmann
Landsickness is a lyric essay about young love and loss and the aftermath of a former lover’s suicide. It explores the inelegant progress of grief and pursues a relentless search for evidence of the beloved’s presence through the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, and the science of depression. While full of tenderness, the poems employ humor and honesty to observe the ugliness of grief and the failure of elegy to restore the dead.
From the funeral, to the office of her dead-end job, to navigating the streets of New York, she experiences a series of false starts as she learns to cope with her new life. Still, there is a real sense of progression in the collection’s end, even as the speaker continues to ask herself: Why am I obsessed with the physics of his fall?
Leigh Lucas holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and a BA from Stanford and lives with her husband and daughter in San Francisco. This is her first book.
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Landsickness by Leigh Lucas Revision #2
