Skeletons

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. One opens with a line Emily Dickinson might have written, had she been on Twitter: “Sorry not sorry, said death” * New York Times Book Review *
Landau’s stunning collection Skeletons opens: “So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am”, and these are poems wonderfully full of attachments, in love with love, friends, sex, flavours and vistas and language, because “isolation it burns”. Behind it is all is rage against “death, incessant klepto”, but Landau is a first-rate phrasemaker and gets down in words “life, the full force of it / pressing us together good and hard.” – Nick Laird
A deeply contemporary and human book from a poet asking if we are “done with life”, because she is “still so into it”, and it shows – Oluwaseun Olayiwola * Guardian *
In her shining fifth collection, Landau chooses the somewhat unexpected acrostic form as a container for her punchy riffs on modern life … A resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *
An unnerving, strangely erotic reminder of what the pandemic felt like … a perfect reflection of those months of enforced intimacy amid the threat of death * Washington Post *
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 *

Deborah Landau is the author of five books of poetry. Her honors 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, 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.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.