Landsickness

In Leigh Lucas’s startling chapbook, Landsickness, “Nights // Are each the same” as the speaker “lie[s] in bed and stare[s] into the messy monuments in search of signs from the beyond.” These “monuments” are precious objects belonging to a lover who died of suicide: “Shrines of his photographs, trinkets, and scraps of his handwriting form on my windowsills […] like birds’ nests.”

Lucas’s poems possess a tender vulnerability in their attempt to make sense of a world transformed in the aftermath of loss, when even “[w]alking the streets takes extreme effort,” when a dead phone leaves the speaker feeling “desperately lost.”

The poems in this book are untitled, giving the impression of one long poem with significant pauses that allow readers to focus on the speaker’s memories of her lover, and her reflections about his suicide:

What happens to a body thrown?

Some believe numbers govern splashes:

A high Reynolds number makes them tall; a high Weber
number makes them messy.

I appreciate attempts to lasso a slippery world, to number,
measure, and taxonomize.

The list-like quality of these lines, as well as the mention of Reynolds and Weber numbers—both related to fluid mechanics and dynamics—suggest ways of trying to understand and explain something that defies comprehension. At the same time, these lines serve as containers for the range of emotions experienced by the speaker.

In Landsickness, speculation and reality are not in opposition to each other, but rather offer different perceptions of the same event—

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.)