Skeletons

April 1, 2023

In her latest collection (following Soft Targets), Anghina/Believer winner Landau explores the landscapes of loneliness and mortality within the isolation wrought by the COVID pandemic. Using her trademark sharp, refreshing wit, she positions 32 poems, all titled "Skeleton" and all acrostics, among poems titled "Flesh" and ends with the defiant, affirming series "Ecstasies." She opens by telling readers what she's about--"So whatever's the opposite of a Buddhist that's what I am./ Kindhearted, yes, but knee-deep in existential gloom"--and unfolds that seeming contradiction, both its warmth and its gloom, in conversational poems meant to engage. If this is a book about death, it's also about sex and yearning as she plays the god of love (Eros) against the god of death (Thanatos): "I wanted to write the thing itself--/ pinned, magnetic, / ambient swoon in the infinite air./ Eros writ large, Life, the full force of it." VERDICT In a book coursing with energy, Landau remains in control. "This is my fifth book of poems. I had my way with each of them." Indeed she has! A good addition to most collections.--Karla Huston

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March 1, 2023
Landau's fifth collection takes a wry and realistic look at the scale of a life: love, death, and fear cut with the dailiness of eating, working, politics, and time spent online. Curiously, most of the poems are titled "Skeleton," and they are acrostics of that word. This gamifying of the form is just one example of the humor running throughout the book, which captures the strange combination of exhaustion and hope in our present moment. Landau's way with a line is exquisite. Spacing, lineation, and ellipsis regulate the rush or slow drip of the words, pacing our reading with the poet's thinking. Often, the form deprives readers of expected grammatical handholds, so we slide into the eye of the poem and her lush language. Most striking is the mouthfeel of the poems, whether arid or salivating, as in a poem about cherries: "louche juice, farm to mouth, the sweetest cerise mess." Skeletons is clever, pragmatic, and, finally, ecstatic about "this bag of bones" we're bound to.

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Starred review from February 20, 2023
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.