ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023BBC 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 is 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 .
ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023BBC 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 is 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 .