Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens considers the way that the absence of touch—in acts of war via the drone, in acts of love via the sext, in aesthetics itself—abstracts the human body, transforming it into a proxy for the real.
“What love poem / could be written when men can no longer / look up?” this book asks, always in a state of flux between doubt and belief—in wars, in gods, in fathers, in love. Through epistolary addresses to these figures of power and others, these poems attempt to make bodies concrete and dangerous, immediate and addressable, once again.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.