Landsickness

$14.95

by Leigh Lucas

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?

by Leigh Lucas

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?

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Winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize

Selected by Chen Chen

About the Author

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.

Advanced Praise

“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

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-07-1