Reader, I

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Illinois.

The Rumpus, "The Most Beautiful Books of 2023"Literary Hub, "Here Are the Poetry Books to Read in 2024"Literary Hub, "7 New Poetry Books to Read This April"Literary Hub, “Véra Nabokov! Darkly humorous sleaze! 22 new books out today”"Shimmering. . . In prose epistles and restive lyrics, Van Landingham’s work teems with the literary and moral pleasures of an undaunted psyche permitting itself to be infused with other minds."—David Woo, Literary Hub, "7 New Poetry Books to Read This April""Inventive and lyrically precise. . . . rife with searing and affective musings on love and matrimony."—Publishers Weekly"Virtuosic. . . . Awake to the dangers of losing oneself ('Me wiving, me future-wide') to the private commons of “we” ('It seemed to me the greatest risk // was to become too legible'), Landingham shows, with a brilliant balance of registers, how gender politics can be fertile ground for high comedy."—Virginia Konchan, Poetry Foundation's "Harriet Books""Reader, I is a remarkable investigation into what makes a marriage, the intersections where fiction fails and real life prevails. Landingham may be one of the most proficient lyricists among us.” —Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question"A dazzling ride of allusion, wit, bawdiness, and joy."—Foreword Reviews"Reader, I is a stirring testimony of desire, purpose, memory, and satisfaction delivered as a series of intellectually and lyrically rich experiences that capture and enflame the reader. "—Jackson Bedenbaugh, Hood of Bone Review“Corey Van Landingham makes use of all her imagination and all her lived experience to yield moments of sublimity, humor, sadness, and joy.  And the real gift of this work is Van Landingham’s ability to transform the mundane into that which is sacred through a kind of plain-spokenness that makes the entire text look like magic: ‘He wiped my face. Lingered at my lips to brush a crumb. This was not my worst, he said. He said it like I could be beautiful again.’ Reader, I is a no holds barred romp of poetry full of formal innovation and wonder.”—Jericho Brown, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Tradition​​”Wickedly learned, Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I is a tome chock full of literary allusion and so terrifyingly clever it offers for serious readers of poetry intense pleasure. Imagine Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence mated with a stack of bridal magazines. Imagine Dickinson ghostwriting Martha Stewart. This is territory I’ve come to think of as Learned Woman’s Hell. It can be difficult here. Smart women know they risk everything if they commit to a cis-het partnership. We’ve read the books. Yet this one is written from the other side. And its achievement is how far it takes us. The beauty of marriage is in the mundane. It might even make you, Reader, believe in love. In the Real Thing.”—Cate Marvin, author of Event Horizon“Corey Van Landingham negotiates between an alleged Victorian decorum and an undeniable contemporary lyricism that dazzles, even as it holds us close. In one of her central poems, ‘The Marriage Plot,’ she writes that ‘We were reared / on Wharton and Bronte, on / Waugh . . . rooting through our pasts / to find some common / ground.’ Reader, I is a marvel of this common ground made of both learnedness and crazy play, wit and revelation, in poems of tremendous elasticity of design—from slender, sinuous lines to blocks of epistolary prose that display Van Landingham’s intimacy and her irony. Hers are poems of identity and cultural bearing, negotiating selfhood within (and without) the institutions of nation and marriage, citizenship and readership, winking, promising, and enlightening all the way.”—David Baker, author of Whale Fall“‘It seemed to me the greatest risk / was to become too legible.’ Acerbically humorous and occasionally melancholy, Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I examines the absurd conventions of heteronormative marriage. We feel its historic and cultural freight lurking around every corner: a frat party where young women dressed as brides are handcuffed to their “grooms” for the evening; a speaker struggling with the challenge of trying to piss while wearing a wedding dress; a wedding anniversary at the site of a Civil War battlefield; a catalogue of Lover’s Leaps. And yet, this is not a cynical book; Van Landingham faithfully makes space for vulnerability, tenderness, and wonder: ‘when we work alone we love each other better.’ Reader, be warned: if you’ve ever navigated the strangeness of being a We, you may very well recognize yourself in these compelling poems.”—Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes