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"A collection of poems by Deborah Landau"--
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SKELETONS
So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist
Sundays I spend feeling sorry for myself
Spooky
Shabbier I am still
FLESH
It must give pleasure
SKELETONS
Superluminal travel
Sugar withdrawal symptoms
Strutting avec Cyndi Lauper
Sucker-punched this morning
FLESH
Every bliss is built this way
SKELETONS
Sex came from nowhere
Soon we were enthralled
Sorry not sorry, said death.
Surprises weren’t really our thing
FLESH
To be afraid of every edge
SKELETONS
Streaming Netflix
Soporifics fail tonight
S’mores aren’t vegetarian
Studmuffin stunt man
FLESH
To be kissed
SKELETONS
Shaken I download “Aura”
Should we get a dog?
Silence isn’t viable tonight
Stolen year
FLESH
Kissing his cheek
SKELETONS
She tended to ruminate
Scrooge-morning after Halloween
Stumbled into a new context today
Savasana pose we kept practicing
FLESH
I thought a lot about your body
SKELETONS
Sunday sloth is its own milk and honey
Sorry to text so late
Serenity, that’s a vicious circular one
So after a year undercover
FLESH
The long and short of it
SKELETONS
Summer dark found us
Sexing sunburned
Slot machine cherries
Skeleton, some wonder
FLESH
It wouldn’t be so bad
I wanted to write the thing itself—
ECSTASIES
About the author
Deborah Landau is the author of four poetry collections: Soft Targets—winner of The Believer Book Award, The Uses of the Body, The Last Usable Hour, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and a Spanish edition of the collection, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017. Landau's work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The New York Times, and has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry. She is a professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
Summary
Witty and glam, Skeletons is a prismatic collection which shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humor and intimacy.
Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau’s dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied with loneliness and mortality, Skeletons flashes with prismatic effect across the persistent allure of the flesh. Initiated during Brooklyn’s early lockdown, the book reflects the increasingly troubling simultaneity of Eros and Thanatos, and the discontents of our virtual lives amidst the threats of a pandemic and corrosive politics. Spring blooms relentlessly while the ambulances siren by. Against the mounting pressure that propels the acrostic “Skeletons,” a series of interstitial companion poems titled “Flesh” negotiate intimacy and desire. The collection culminates in an ecstatic sequence celebrating the love and connection that persist despite our fraught present moment. Shrugging off her own anxiety and disillusionment with characteristic humor and pitch-perfect cadence, Landau finds levity in pyrotechnic lines, sonic play, and a wholly original language, asking: “Any way outta this bag of bones?”
