Skeletons

ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023

BBC POETRY EXTRA 'Book of the Month'

Landau's stunning collection Skeletons opens: "So whatever's the opposite of a Buddhist that's what I am", and these are poems wonderfully full of attachments, in love with love, friends, sex, flavours and vistas and language, because "isolation it burns". Behind it all is rage against "death, incessant klepto", but Landau is a first-rate phrasemaker and gets down in words "life, the full force of it / pressing us together good and hard."' - Nick Laird

'Whether humour or misery or pleasure is explored, the collection reminds us that "these bones were made for us". A deeply contemporary and human book from a poet asking if we are "done with life", because she is "still so into it", and it shows.' - Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Guardian

'Deborah Landau's real and impressive accomplishment in Skeletons is her fashioning of a cleverly structured cumulative experience... A convincing expression of the knotty, touching truth of our humanness and its beautiful, short span: the "precarious yet exquisite alive."' - Kathryn Gray, TLS

'Landau's killer wit evokes Dorothy Parker crossed with Sylvia Plath - leaping spark after spark, growing to deadly dark fire.' - Los Angeles Times

'Deborah Landau has developed a style of writing poetry that reminds me of Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson, these long poems that feel dreamy because they are so lyrical.' - Boston Globe

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 humour 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?'