Landsickness by Leigh Lucas
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Landsickness”
Poetry
Tupelo Press, 2024
$14.95, 30 pages
ISBN: 978-1-961209-09-1

Selected by the poet Chen Chen as the winner of the Tupelo Press’s Sunken Garden Chapbook contest, Leigh Lucas’ collection has been described as a single long narrative poem, though it’s composed of twenty different lyrics, whose titles are taken from their first lines. Certainly, the individual pieces have found homes in small lit. mags. from The Tusculum Review to North American Review to Poem-a-Day to Frontier Poetry, but the individual pieces are like a spectrum of experience and add up to one poetic meditation, as the poet comes to terms with her boyfriend’s suicide.

But we don’t learn about the suicide right away. The first poem, called “In my new life I must learn everything again,” introduces us to the narrator’s distress (“My friends are patient.”); in the second she alludes to her “bad attitude” at work. She’s clearly been traumatized, and the people around her are cutting her some slack. Everybody knows. “I know I am embarrassing myself,” one poem begins, and elsewhere: “Back home, I crawl under the covers.” It’s her “new lifestyle.” 

New lifestyle? “I lie to my friends about laundered clothes, to my boss about work completed. I lie to myself that I wash my hands after I use the bathroom,” she writes in the third poem (“Shrines of his photographs, trinkets, and scraps”).

It’s not until eight poems in that she clarifies:

The man I love

Jumped off a bridge on September 30th at 4 in the afternoon.

Boom.

“The man I love / taught poetry,” she writes in the subsequent piece, and it’s like a flood breaks the dam and her emotion pours out. She obsessively hoards her memories. “I am pitiful at my sole pursuit: / Nothing must disappear.”

It’s as if Leigh Lucas is channeling Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, from denial through anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

In “I love to think about his body” the narrator gives in to the obsession. “When nobody’s watching, I pretend it’s mine,” she confesses, and the poem ends on a humorous note:

I take it out for a spin around the block, feed it strawberries,
test out a big blasting fart.

“It’s my fantasy so I invite him to dinner,” the next poem begins. “It’s time to have a little chat,” she writes later in the poem, and it’s as if the “bargaining” phase has begun.

“My Adult Friend the Grief Therapist” and “Scientists study depression in rats” take an almost absurdist analytical view. In the first of these she writes:

Q: Can suicide be prevented?
A: It depends.

Q: Should suicide be prevented?
A: It depends.

At last the poet faces the facticity of the event. “He is twenty-seven-and-a-half” presents a hazy picture of the man standing on the bridge, deciding to jump. She “zooms out for a wide angle.” He jumps. “The water doesn’t move like blood because it moves like water.” It’s almost prosaic, the drama removed. 

The following poem, “A splash is a sudden disturbance,” goes into the physics of an object slamming into water, the displacement of air, the rush of water to fill the vacancy, etc. Lucas tells us in a note that an article in Popular Mechanics (Mike Orkutt’s “The Physics of a Cannonball Splash”) was inspirational in the composition of the poem.

The final poem, “At the funeral, his other former girlfriend,” signals a kind of acceptance. For one thing, she realizes she is not the only person experiencing the loss, not even the favorite friend: the other former girlfriend delivers the eulogy. “I sit in the pew.” Other former girlfriends sit near her.

There are so many different people to hate, so I keep things
simple and hate everyone.

So what is “landsickness”? Twice she alludes to seasickness, that off-balance feeling of nausea we’ve all experienced. Is landsickness somehow the opposite but the same? “Here’s the rub. Fickle memory, swirling time, debilitating seasickness.” She even considers Emily Dickinson’s classic, “Because I could not stop for death,” reworking words, carriage and scarcely. The other time she mentions seasickness comes at the end of “I pin down his poems and threaten the shredder”:

A simpleton-philosopher, 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.)

Anyone who has known a person who took his or her own life knows this deep sense of loss, confusion, and overwhelming grief. The constant battering of why, why, why, like waves against a reef. That often-overused laudatory term, tour de force, applies so emphatically to Landsickness, for this book certainly is a “feat of strength,” a brave coming-to-grips with the overwhelming experience of losing a young love, running the gamut of emotions.