Overview

A lyric essay about young love and loss and the aftermath of a former lover's suicide. Landsickness 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, the speaker 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?""

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9781961209091

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""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

"""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"

Author Information

Leigh Lucas holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson and a BA from Stanford and lives on the coast of Northern California.

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