Antidote

In Corey Van Landingham's Antidote, love equates with disease, valediction is a contact sport, the moon is a lunatic, and someone is always watching. Here the uncanny coexists with the personal, so that each poem undergoes making and unmaking, is birthed and bound in an acute strangeness. Elegy is made new by a speaker both heartbreaking and transgressive. Van Landingham reveals the instability of self and perception in states of grief; she is not afraid to tip the world upside down and shake it out, gather the lint and change from its pockets and say, "I can make something with this." Wild and surreal, driven by loss, Antidote invites both the beautiful and the brutal into its arms, allowing for shocking declarations about love: that it is like hibernation, a car crash, or a parasite. Time, geography, and landscape are called into question as backdrops for various forms of valediction. It soon becomes clear that there is no antidote one can take for grief or heartbreak; that love can, at times, feel like violence; and that one may never get better at saying goodbye.

Author: Corey Van Landingham
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 10/28/2013
Pages: 63
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9780814251874
ISBN10: 0814251870
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Corey Van Landingham is a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University. She grew up in Oregon and holds degrees from Lewis & Clark College and Purdue University, where she was a Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2012, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.