Reader, I

Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I moves between intimate address and artful uncovering of foundational myths relating to the institution of marriage. Virtuosic poems lend a ludic female perspective to the 18th century “marriage plot”; from Troy, “the forest primeval” of Western romance, to rented beach shacks and frat parties, Van Landingham modernizes the fault lines of patriarchal and literary histories:

We knew what hid

            behind marble fountains,
box seats for Faust,
            what lingered in our entwined,

fictional foundations.

Awake to the dangers of losing oneself (“Me wiving, me future-wide”) to the private commons of “we” (“It seemed to me the greatest risk // was to become too legible”), Landingham shows, with a brilliant balance of registers, how gender politics can be fertile ground for high comedy:

        Dear, dear reader—please excuse my flickers of ire. I do admire his brain, the ease with which he speaks. I like when he compares my ass to a Man Ray, recites a passage straight from Proust. I just tend to quote, more often, Phoebe Buffay.

Through personae and formal play, the poet gives voice to archetypal protagonists (Dido, Hera, Eve, Juliet) long overwritten by men, while widening the lens on their silencing:

When [Juliet] speaks, she is the amphitheater split nel mezzo after the
earthquake.

Is the earthquake.

When she speaks she does not say nothing.

“Aphasia,” a poem focused less on de-idealizing marriage than on reciprocal witnessing, invokes Tolstoy, the ineffable, and the difficulty of “a happier way to write of love.” The poem concludes with the speaker looking up from her reading, only to see her husband looking at her: “‘What?’ / I asked. What was it? He shook / his head, smiled. I couldn’t say.”

Van Landingham offers a grand opera account of coupling, couplets, class politics, and the declarative speech act of saying “I do” with a stunning devotional poem, “Lyrical Vows,” revealing a mind and craft that move at lightning speed:

I travel among unknown men on roads miles above the sea. Little
amorists crossing a glacier’s dalliance.

[…]

When I get the courage to leave is when I know I can stay.

[…]

I promise never to presume us original

I take you to be.