Orange, Dreaming

by K.T. Landon

Furious beating. In many ways that is what great poetry is, and that is what we find in KT Landon's marvelous first book. Furious beating because poetry is always fighting against a world that is not what we thought it could be. And so here, it is inevitable death that seems at first to haunt the poet, from the Dead who occasionally make their cameo appearances to reminders to the poet's husband about mortality, and a kind of worry, a wondering "if words could save anything from anything." But the plain and marvelous fact is that simply facing it is a way of understanding and then transcending it, and this Landon does superbly in poems that rise like the birds in one poem "mastering the air--a furious beating / of wings and hearts, an insistence / that gravity is not the last or only law." It isn't, as we learn here, and that is the essential gift this book brings.



Richard Jackson, author of Traversings (with Robert Vivian) and Retrievals



At once colloquial and elegant, Orange, Dreaming illuminates questions of love, the afterlife, the nature of God, and the nature of knowledge with refreshing clarity and never a hint of abstraction. It offers instead crisp, surprising gestures, gathering elements of childhood obsession and memory, along with daily images--vegetables left in the fridge past their prime, an effort to free a crane fly from the dishwasher--into meditations that bloom with intelligence and carry the reader gently, often with humor, always with empathy, into realms philosophers and theologians inhabit more doggedly. It is a true pleasure to ride the waves of observation, image, and insight in this gem of a book.



Leslie Ullman, author of Library of Small Happiness (essays) and Progress on the Subject of Immensity (poems)

Genres: Poetry

38 pages, Paperback

Published January 10, 2017

About the author

K. T. Landon is the author of the chapbook Orange, Dreaming (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She is the 2013 winner of the Arts & Letters PRIME Poetry Prize, a finalist in Narrative's Ninth Annual Poetry Contest, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net anthology. She serves as a Senior Poetry Reader for Muzzle, and her work has appeared in Passages North, Ibbetson Street, and Best New Poets 2017, among others.

Landon received her AB from Dartmouth College her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She works as a director for a group of data engineering teams at a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Daniel Barlekamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this chapbook on a whim from a local-authors table at Wicked Good Books in Salem, Massachusetts, and I'm glad I did. K.T. Landon writes short, approachable, conversational poems that pack a lot of emotional resonance and humor into just a few lines (I appreciate short poems, and none of these run longer than a page). Many of them are a punch to the gut and very funny at the same time. These poems also read beautifully aloud. I'll definitely be watching for more books from Landon in the future and looking for her poems in magazines in the meantime.

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happily, I attended a reading of selections from this collection by the poet. Her work deserves to be heard. Having the voice in my head makes the words dance off the page.