Reader, I

July 15, 2024
Drawing its title from a line in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (“Reader, I married him”), the inventive and lyrically precise sophomore outing from Van Landingham (Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens) is organized in five sections, the majority of its poems titled “Reader, I” followed by a bracketed portion: “Reader, I .” This conceit successfully ties the poems together and implicates the reader as it brilliantly challenges some of the stereotypes of marriage through personal reflections and literary motifs. The opening prose poem sets the stakes: “ according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping?” The long poem “The Marriage Plot” features lyric sections that capture some of Van Landingham’s atmospheric writing at its best: “On the Romantic Danube// river cruise my mother booked/ for us a month before/ my wedding, I watched her dance// with a stranger// to a halting ‘Blue Moon’/ broadcast live to our stateroom./ The sunset// having annulled itself// hours before, somewhere between/ Krems and Vienna, it seemed// we were floating in deep, dark space.” This accomplished book is rife with searing and affective musings on love and matrimony.