Skeletons

by Deborah Landau

"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 "Sorry not sorry, said death."
               
              -- The New York Times Book Review
 
            * STARRED REVIEW in   Publisher's Weekly


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, "Any way outta this bag of bones?"

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

80 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2023

About the author

Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons, which was one of The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2023." Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and in three editions of The Best American Poetry. Her honors include The Believer Book Award, the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a Professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

deborahlandau.com

Reviews

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensual as all get out, smart and fun! Chatty but not “about” a speaker, inasmuch as a speaker is a specific person with a history; these seem to be more about a diffused mind body moving through specific worlds

[Siani-Simone Ammons · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the mention of bodies...the silliness of it all..., and the usage of alliteration that, felt too...silly. and i love silly poems not not for this! this was for a class will find out soon if this was the full poetry book.

[Ryan Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sexy, seasonal, and life-affirming.

*

It must give pleasure but rarely it rarely does.
But pleasure is so useful when it comes.
Pleasure says this is your sort of place, your year, you live here.
Pleasure's the perfect swerve. It wins you back.
Pain won't take you nowhere.
Chocolate on the tongue. Vodka. Velvet. Voilà.
A zipper slinking in its silver, its long slide down.

Oh my god.

*

Studmuffin stuntman spicing up my winter quarantine
keep out of my dreams please with your
ersatz bedside manner inciting my time-wasting
libidinous should-we-get-to-know-each-other in some deep
ecstatic way? um, don't confuse dreamy apparition with
true tonic wilding into ruminative loop-the-loops—
ok, let's bring it down a notch say yes to hot earthling
nirvana—the incarnate husband, mortalflesh here&now

For some reason I’ve been waking up at 4am a fair bit recently. Early nights falling asleep with the lights on to etymology podcasts probably. At that time I conjure thoughts of real people. Filmed sex carries no weight in memory I realise and I feel like that is so instructive—it gives me nothing to feed on; nothing to hunger for. Nothing compares to a bag of bones. The warm resistance between flesh and skeleton. Their nutrient-rich realness.

*

You in your ecstasy of coffee me all amped on juice
an ooze of sunshine a foil of water a concordance
two waves in sync making a larger bright
it's unseasonably warm again nothing will bloom
the trees blown way ahead of schedule and we never
kissed not even once despite the come-ons of summer
scented with rain, lilacs in the deli tempting to send me over the edge
as if we could rinse everything and be clean again but no—
Thursday 4 p.m. the city can be beautiful
when it wants to stands around so photogenic
by the boat pond, lucent doorway of the day
beams us through, pine needles, puddles, tussle
on the sidewalk, a pigeon or two— streaming by
here come the minutes exposing themselves
and there they go what is real?
June keeps on flaunting its meadow of music, its drink
let's leave our apartments and go to the park
it's a festival we want a popsicle some honeydew a break
let's go out into the music flowingbroadly now through giant speakers.
The success of friendship let's drink to it—
Hello emptiness that is coming it will engulf
and then, a freighted woman I'll fall back into my hole,
goodbye. My body will never be satisfied.
But here in the preheadache seasonal glitter,
first burst of summer, still the thrill of it, the heat—

Ugh.

*

I wanted to write the thing itself—
pinned, magnetic,
ambient swoon in the infinite air.
Eros writ large.
Life, the full force of it
pressing us together good and hard.
But. But what?

Ugh!

*

Catch me alive? I am today—swept through the air in a flesh,
thinky-feeling, lugging itself up the subway stairs
& now back on Spring Street again in the dazing light

pumping the marrow a breeze of breath a blood
& still the minutes accelerate & we wake backweighted
with days will we waste them all & then when we get there

we will think I wasted them all, stony before I was laid
in stone, mourning before I was mourned
& what was this velvet for? spring didn't know—

flags of the grave? well also a jubilance not just a bawling
& off again toward whatever, drinking exalted or coughing
but still can swallow & here all your parts are warm & mostly work

& look it's luck, while not yet a word from the underworld,
the necklace of days bracelets of hours the flush of blood
present swelling the yes please of sex the abject of—

is it precarious yes exquisite alive, staging its trance
the hand in hand, the mouth sloshed with coffee, sugared & warm,
your silent reading this now.

God damn.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Any way outta this bag of bones?” asks the poet in these sardonic poems that brood over the pandemic lockdown, the pestilence of the flesh, and the body’s persistent allure in the face of mortality.

Favorite Poems:
Flesh: “It must give pleasure”
Skeleton: “Sorry not sorry, said death”
Skeleton: “Streaming Netflix”
Skeleton: “Soporifics fail tonight”
Flesh: “Every bliss is built this way”
Flesh: “I thought a lot about your body”
Skeleton: “Shabbier I am still a person”
Flesh: “The long and short of it”
Skeleton: “Skeleton, some wonder if you are practical”
Flesh: “You in your ecstasy of coffee”
Ecstasies I: “In the xyzs of nights and days
Ecstasies II: “Like most people, I am sad at the source”
Ecstasies III: “Are we done with life?”
Ecstasies IV: “Even coffins oblige”
Ecstasies V: “Catch me alive?”

[Sara Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the xyzs of nights and days we stayed as if the conversation would go on forever, you, you, you-ample days of you,

your beard accumulating a bit of snow, the gradual showing of bone, a grizzled diminishment.
The stacked-up winters, each in its place.

In this manner the years.
Spooled out the other side as if in plain view— a field without you.

Meanwhile we took good care, the greens were organic, honey sweetened the pot, the membrane between us stayed transparent, and we took seriously our allegiance to dream.

[Leonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skeletons by Deborah Landau is a book of poetry that I find difficult to describe, but others have described as a "Dorothy Parker crossed with Sylvia Plath" or " Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson." I didn't think of those poets when reading this book, but gained more understanding when I read some of them the second time, but still found them difficult. This is not light reading, but poetry that requires some work on the part of the reader.

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental yet grounded, this collection combines seemingly disparate elements in an eclectic harmony of insightful verse. Landau has a clear and immediate voice that expresses itself urgently against the threat of the pandemic and modern politics. She uses wit and wordplay well alongside touching insight for the internet age.

[H]

the cover photo doesn’t do justice to how beautiful this is, gold letters shining against the translucent marble. i think i’m more interested in form and organization—the book switches between Skeleton and Flesh poems, and then ends on Ecstasies—than the words themselves, but i might need to give it another read. font changes! a bold choice. but does the work itself hold up?

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dramatic monologue revitalised

This brilliantly witty poetry gets to the heart of what it is to be alive. The body in dialogue with itself opens up a new space for the understanding of the human condition.

[Aline]

sealey challenge 1/31

“i wanted to write the thing itself— / pinned, magnetic, / ambient swoon in the infinite air” !!!

[Alyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite line: "Nights were felt as a stream of departures in the hive."

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy read on modern topics. I liked the pace of these poems - quick but direct, like all good poetry not a word wasted.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not connect...

[dikshya · Rating 2 out of 5]

some were good....most were not

all the good poems were at the end too so I had to go through 70 pages of mediocrity to reach the good stuff

[Kevin Revolinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pondering the point of it all, and the finality. Not in a dark way, really, maybe wistful, sometimes sensual? Liked these.