Antidote by Corey Van Landingham

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.