Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens

$19.95

by Corey Van Landingham

WINNER of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize

Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens considers the way that the absence of touch—in acts of war via the drone, in acts of love via the sext, in aesthetics itself—abstracts the human body, transforming it into a proxy for the real.

“What love poem / could be written when men can no longer / look up?” this book asks, always in a state of flux between doubt and belief—in wars, in gods, in fathers, in love. Through epistolary addresses to these figures of power and others, these poems attempt to make bodies concrete and dangerous, immediate and addressable, once again.

by Corey Van Landingham

WINNER of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize

Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens considers the way that the absence of touch—in acts of war via the drone, in acts of love via the sext, in aesthetics itself—abstracts the human body, transforming it into a proxy for the real.

“What love poem / could be written when men can no longer / look up?” this book asks, always in a state of flux between doubt and belief—in wars, in gods, in fathers, in love. Through epistolary addresses to these figures of power and others, these poems attempt to make bodies concrete and dangerous, immediate and addressable, once again.

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About the Author

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.

Join Corey Van Landingham in conversation about craft with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings podcast.

Join Corey Van Landingham in conversation with Esteban Rodriguez at the EcoTho Review.

Advanced Praise

“In a world where drones are named for the messenger god, who is also the god of thieves, where a wedding celebration can be shattered by a missile fired by no one at all, in a world of destruction-by-proxy and a fever dream of omniscience, Corey Van Landingham gives us a beautiful, penetrating book of poems. These pages fairly shimmer with intelligence. And with something more important too: with insight that restores us to our senses.” —Linda Gregerson

Format: Paperback
Published: January 2022
ISBN: 978-1-946482-61-7