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One of The Believer reader survey's best works of poetry, 2013 • One of Flavorwire's 50 Essential Works of Poetry That Everyone Should Read"

In Antidote—the award-winning debut from Guggenheim Fellow and Levis Reading Prize winner Corey Van Landingham—love equates with disease, valediction becomes a contact sport, the moon turns lunatic, and someone is always watching. Here, the uncanny presses up against the intimate, so each poem undergoes a simultaneous making and unmaking, born and bound in exquisite strangeness.

Van Landingham reinvents elegy through a speaker both transgressive and tender, revealing how grief destabilizes the self and reorders perception. She tips the world upside down, shakes loose the debris, and says, I can make something with this.

Wild and surreal, driven by loss, Antidote embraces the beautiful and the brutal in equal measure, offering startling claims about love—its likeness to hibernation, a car crash, a parasite. Time, landscape, and geography dissolve, leaving behind the raw terrains of departure. Ultimately, the book insists there is no cure for heartbreak, that love can mirror violence, and that goodbye never becomes easier.

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.