Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham Review by Erick Verran

Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham

Review by Erick Verran

Publisher: Sarabande Books

Publication Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 978-1-956046-25-0 

Pages: 86

No Bird: A Review of Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I

Except for long ribbons of short, crimped lines and page-wide couplets, the bulk of Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I (titled by Robert Graves, you almost want to say) takes the form of epistolary prose paragraphs, some compacted out of traditional stanzas, with what, presumably, had been end rhymes crushed together like a John Chamberlain sculpture:

—– 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.

In direct address, Landingham struggles, like a Midwestern Jane Eyre, against the expectations of Shakespeare as much as patriarchal norms (“A mirror flashes back your blind spots. A man reveals worse: your possible selves. The you you might have been. See it fill his eyes”). In one poem, “Reader, I [swore I’d be a casual bride],” she asks our advice for her impending wedding ceremony as the text, with Freudian irrepressibility, continually lands on -ide words (snide, hide, Telluride, insecticide . . .). Recall that, for its time, the self-determination latent in “Reader, I married him”—that is, not “he married me” or “we married”—was radical, close to bragging. Jane, the eponymous hero of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, maintains some say in her fate. Yet neither she nor Landingham set out to abolish any traditions: “It shouldn’t—I know—take a man, but [. . . t]here is an order he brings. Clean lines. Paired socks. No one should expect a marriage to save her. No one should assume she can open the jar herself.” Despite her earlier mention of an octopus squeezing itself into a glass jar on an aquarium’s live video feed (“flirt[ing] amorphous for the camera”), Landingham is talking about pickles.

While the poet’s husband contents himself with de-leafing their gutters or straightening a picture frame, his wife, newly wed, fears succumbing to a state of decorative complacency. So Landingham writes of “how easily I turned plinth and pedestal. Bovine,” which encompasses both statuesque bourgeois and the cow-eyed postcoital rejoicing of Emma Bovary. Regrettably, about once per poem Landingham cannot help taking a detour (“Shall I bleach my asshole?” “Let the neighbors watch // our weekday reverse cowgirl”) that truly isn’t worth the departure. If these attempts at provocation give the reader’s attention a pinch, they are never crass enough to actually shock. Titillation shouldn’t risk being uninteresting. This is forgivable, as far as quibbles go, except the ambivalence of Landingham’s project also makes her something of a shapeshifter. Here she resembles Basil Bunting (“Vetch hasped against the chain-link fence”), there Ted Hughes, with his instinct for the raw particularity of nature (“Night-small creatures ran up and down the trunk, so close I could feel the protein in their claws”), even the erotic quietude of Richie Hofmann (“We wrote each other letters. Quoted Milton. That cavalier. Discarded our separate tragedies for one”). Which isn’t to say that Landingham’s poetry is unconsciously masculine, stylistic ballast to the book’s societal preoccupations. Perhaps she is cognizant of the fact. 

After a pugnacious start that submits Virgil’s Aeneid to the Bechdel test (“And get this—he doesn’t look back”), the remainder of Reader I’s acrimony, in view of its Brontëan concept, seems almost compulsory, how Landingham sees her frame being legitimated. In an unguarded moment, a genuinely inspired image may get through. This, for instance:

We can walk to the grass tennis courts and wave,
—–in a summer storm,

our rackets.

—–As if to tempt
lightning, or as if we
—–were beating out the moths

from exotic carpets

—–in a long novel
that half the population
—–doesn’t have the window-light

to read.

There’s beautiful music, too, if you’re willing to ignore the abundance of laundry: “How he walked me down small Lake County dunes, through the switchgrass, pale sea rocket, picked the cocklebur from my socks.” At times, her talk slips into a connect-the-dots of near homophones (“Our gentleness waning, / we can smash a glass or two / on a Tuesday, unwind some // old wound,” which is somewhat like Hughes’s “Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion / Lie still as the sun” [from The Hawk in the Rain]), though wit for Landingham is seldom an end in itself. With an accusation in the kitchen of phone infidelity, or cheating on the household budget (“And when he was away? I ate spiteful pho—steaming, heat he couldn’t take—on lunch breaks. Extra tofu, he’d never know”), the narrative can be domestically tame, as suburban woes sound to anyone forced to hear about them. Five sections and two entr’actes later, vows are exchanged in epilogue (these, unfortunately, include “stay[ing] in my own lane,” daily reminders of the couple’s mortality, and hand jobs). Actually affecting is the glimpse of a sick father we get in a handful of waltzy stanzas, besides the poems devoted to the author’s do-good other half, who “[i]s skilled in weather-talk [. . . and] calls his mother.”

When she isn’t already tumbling out a thesis clause by fractional clause, Landingham has a habit of butting in on the story she is relating (“Then I shared the blood of three still-breathings. Lone quatrain, us. Who mostly didn’t speak, or write. All to say—”). In “Adult Swim,” however, a naturally comic scenario, a latter-day Marie Antoinette luxuriating in a public swimming pool, is permitted to grow whole, interrogatives and all:

It’s nearly time to reclaim
their pool. Each day, each hour
they have dragged their soaking bodies
from its coolness and allowed their mothers
the reapplication of lotion and the petting
of their wet, tender heads.

No agony is greater
than theirs. Never have I felt so powerful.
Aren’t I magnificent,
floating on my back dead center? Aren’t I
a kingdom of one?
I could grow new gods.
Small princes.

(My grandmother’s voice—if you own nothing
you are nothing—as she handed me, at Christmas,
a fresh certificate of stock. But she was an unhappy woman,
and is dead.)

A whinny of pain
from a skinned knee, quick flash
of white before the blood. Not my wound
to treat. Another boy explaining to his mother’s magazine
how every day, every single day,
God puts out the sun by dunking it in the ocean.
Like a match dropped
into a glass.

Where does the next one come from?
he wants to know.

One up to his thighs already
until the strict whistle, the chorus
of booing beside him,
a leap back.
Lined on the plastic rim, the boys stare differently
than the men they will become.

As with Reader, I’s opening poem, set in a local bowling alley, this is generous as well as tonally perfect, managing to thread Landingham’s gender equitability concerns without the other poems’ highly associative, locationless rage (“Happiness—ha. So I liked to let bitters fall from a glass dropper into champagne”). Jane the childless millennial, sunglassed and unbothered, nevertheless deigns to consider the little, squinting men who wait on her. 

What too many of the title poems seek to contrive is the breathlessness of a letter, and they are rabidly intelligent; but, as etiquette manuals used to instruct, “a letter should be regarded not merely as a medium for the communication of intelligence.” The book’s dueling epigraphs—“It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,” from a letter of Brontë’s, and the last line of Jane Eyre—suggest that sometimes we commit in art acts which we would advise against in life. (The confirmation is a later quote, from The Age of Innocence, which asks whether characters in novels make adequate role models for the living.) The big if, of course, is marriage, its sunny beginnings and dismal statistical average. Gratifying, then, buried in all that squared-off prose, is a poem about learning to love the Ohio of her spouse’s childhood, its youth football and thunder, morning mass and the dust. How much more visceral a single place is, some not-too-wordy memory suffused with its writer’s former temperament, compared with a daisy chain of unlocatable moods. Eschewing cut-to-fit sentiment and the justification of feelings, the best efforts of this collection remind us that making it work involves a cerebral kind of grace, the relaxation of thinking into knowing.

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Erick Verran is the author of Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021) and a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. His writing is forthcoming or appears in Literary Matters, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rain Taxi, the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, The Drift, the Harvard Review, the Oxford Review of Books, On the Seawall, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Cortland Review, Annulet, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press), winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize, and Reader, I (forthcoming from Sarabande Books in Spring 2024). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, and The New Yorker. A recipient of a NEA Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Illinois.    

7 August 2024