Landsickness, by Leigh Lucas Published by Tupelo Press, 2024 Winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize Selected by Chen Chen
Reviewed by Risa Denenberg
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. –Kahlil Gibran
Leigh Lucas, in her chapbook Landsickness, embodies these words of Kahlil Gibran in her response to the death of a lover by suicide. Her world breaks open and makes no sense to her. She shuts down; refuses to change clothes or bathe; crawls under covers; dreams and fantasizes about her lover; and hoards small keepsakes and details about him. None of these behaviors are unusual in someone newly bereaved; but the intensity of anguish in these poems feels urgent and disquieting. The first line in the first of these untitled poems is: “In my new life, I must learn everything again.” There is no going back, no living with the reality of the death. Everything is undone.
There is a certain mood of unreality in the face of any death (“how can the world go on as if …”), but in some situations, there is no capacity for resolution, for moving on. Lucas dwells in a space that is sometimes referred to as “complicated grief,” i.e., grieving that continues to be intense, persistent and debilitating. To offset the collapse of faith caused by the death, Lucas lands in a deeply creative place: in poems.
I seasick between: I knew this would happen (rock). And how could it have (rock). Between: I knew him as well as I could know someone. And I didn’t know him at all. (Rock, rock.)
I identify with Lucas’ predicament, both as a poet and as a woman who has lost her best friend. Grief can be endless; if it ends, the relationship with the deceased is entirely broken. Lucas says, “The final note I hold’s unending.” It changes with time, but the nature of the loss colors the grief forever. There are so many unanswerable questions. In this case, the never-to-be answered question is: Why? And, could I have done something? Lucas gets no certain answers from a grief therapist.
Q: Can suicide be prevented? A: It depends.
Q: Should suicide be prevented? A: It depends.
And yet, she fears that in fact, she will forget: “Here’s the rub. Fickle memory, swirling time, debilitating seasickness.” This leads to obsessive behaviors, “My own complex system of ordering his belongings and memorizing minutia […] mental tests of recalling exact details of his poems, drawings and letters, of his feet, palms, and the curve of his back.”
Lucas searches deeply for answers, for comfort, for a way to understand if not accept. She digs deep searching for some explanation, some theory to account for the loss. She reports findings from a study of rats that offers an eerily cogent explanation:
Scientists study depression in rats.
How we tell they have it and how bad they have it:
we drop them into a bucket of water and see how long they paddle.
This only circles the question of why wasn’t this death prevented? And how was I to know the depth of his depression?
Does facing fact help? Lucas mulls over the raw facts:
The man I love
Jumped off a bridge on September 30th at 4 in the afternoon.
//
The man I love
taught poetry
to college students and kids at the Y.
And then she distances from the facts with the tiniest of minutiae: “The object // descends // leaving air in its wake.” And, “Kerplop.”
Finally, Lucas adds details from the funeral: “Sitting in front of me, and behind me, and also to both sides, are more former girlfriends.” Readers, I never thought of Lucas as a former girlfriend, despite this addendum. She is all in from the moment of his death, to the end of time with her promise (threat): “The world will be unsettled. // I will unsettle them.”
Leigh Lucas is a writer in San Francisco. Her chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. She has been awarded residencies at Tin House, Community of Writers, and Kenyon, and has been recognized with AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize, as well as with a Best New Poet nomination, Best of Net nomination, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Leigh’s poems can be found in Academy of American Poets’Poem-a-Day, Poet Lore, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson.
Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder of Headmistress Press and curator at The Poetry Café Online. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently, Rain/Dweller (MoonPath Press, 2023). She is currently working on a memoir-in-progress: Mother, Interrupted.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
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