Deborah Landau simultaneously signals these two conceits—victory over decay and the ultimate victory of decay ... Landau creates an ossuary in miniature: two skeletons per page, with each brief poem studded with death references ... These poems are conversational memento mori, sprinkled with chatty, O’Haraesque bursts right out the gate ... The surprising line breaks and enjambment teeter asymmetrically to exhilarating effect ... One pleasure of Skeletons is watching Landau switch modes of representation to describe sex.
These morbid poems are also utterly delightful….Maybe we can’t seize the day, but Landau urges us to attune ourselves, while we can, to the present moment, in all its fullness and fragility. Invoking 'grass stains, mosquito bites, biking at night,' the death-obsessed Skeletons makes us feel just how 'precarious yes exquisite' they are.
In a book coursing with energy, Landau remains in control. 'This is my fifth book of poems. I had my way with each of them.' Indeed she has! A good addition to most collections.
Landau’s fifth collection takes a wry and realistic look at the scale of a life ... Most striking is the mouthfeel of the poems, whether arid or salivating, as in a poem about cherries ... Skeletons is clever, pragmatic, and, finally, ecstatic about 'this bag of bones' we’re bound to.
If the acrostic 'Skeleton' poems are expressions of the speaker’s discursive mind, the 'Flesh' poems are sensuous, somatic embodiments ... If the acrostic 'Skeleton' poems are existential preoccupations with alienation and mortality, and the 'Flesh' poems are sensual expressions of desire and closeness, the final poem sequence, 'Ecstasies,' is a happy medium that recommits the speaker (and us) to the sweetness of life, a tribute to human tenderness in the face of fraught interpersonal connections ... In Skeletons, Landau has used formal constraint to amplify and explore her alienated speaker’s anxieties and concerns. Through juxtaposition of form, syntactical variation, and a distinctive lexicon, she has also liberated her speaker, compelling them to 'inhabit your skin like you’re still here.'
Deborah Landau's fifth book goes down like a fine craft cocktail, cold and smooth, with a lingering burn....Landau showcases her signature edginess, wryly ruminating on 'existential gloom,' monogamy and its discontents, 'the filth and joy' of living in a body...Landau's self-deprecating wit is so elegant we can't help but give in to her charms, entranced as she listens to Calm app mantras, fails at corpse pose, takes 'the kale and kombucha.' Skeletons sings most sublimely in its exaltation of desire. The whole collection is a fierce ode to mortality, mourning time's passage as it revels in the pleasures of the flesh, urging us to say yes despite everything: 'The best time for the body is now.'
