Deborah Landau’s Skeletons (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) is organized into alternating “Skeleton” and “Flesh” poems, with a final section of “Ecstasies.” Specifically, there are eight sections each comprised of four eight-line acrostic poems that spell out SKELETON. These are followed by formally non-constrained, fairly short poems each entitled “Flesh.” The final section, “Ecstasies,” is a five-section poem sequence. The book, by virtue of this specific organization and using the acrostic so prominently, presents two questions: how does the acrostic function in this work, and what dynamic is brought to bear by juxtaposing these various sections of the collection?
My first observation in encountering the acrostic at the individual poem level is how adherence to the constraint has fascinating lexical, syntactical, and tonal impacts. The first “Skeleton” begins:
So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am.
A more syntactically direct, colloquial phrasing would be: “I am the opposite of whatever a Buddhist is.” That would be an unequivocal declaration with definitive closure. The mandatory “S” leads to a “So,” which has a different tonal effect. It places us in the midst of a kind of intimate, active disclosure (as in “So, I’ve been thinking”). It is more conversational; it is a filler word. However, it also opens possibilities. The line starts with this subordinating conjunction, so we don’t know what experiences or decisions led us to this assertion. In other words, we don’t know what upstream journey got us here, so we are made attentive to that question, which unfolds through the collection. We see the same kind of syntactical convolutions leading to this idiosyncratic and strangely engaging tonal quality in many of the “Skeleton” poems (First line examples: “Serenity, that’s a vicious circular one,” “Sugar withdrawal symptoms turn out to be what, exactly,” “Sunday sloth is its own milk and honey, honey, am I right?”).
A second effect of the constraint is the dynamism created by the contemplative movement and tonal shifts propelled by the mandatory use of certain letters. The first skeleton continues:
Kindhearted, yes, but knee-deep in existential gloom,
except when the fog smokes the bridges like this—
like, instead of being afraid, we might juice ourselves up,
eh, like, might get kissed again? Dwelling in bones I go straight
through life, a sublime abundance—cherries, dog’s breath, the sun, then
(ouch) & all of us snuffed out. Dear one, what is waiting for us tonight,
nostalgia? the homes of childhood? oblivion? How we hate to go—
The first word of almost every line creates a volta that is either a contemplative shift (“except” and “nostalgia”) or a tonal one (“like,” “eh,” “(ouch)”). The labile subjectivity that results is a feature of many of the “Skeleton” poems. These first words often have the added effect of bringing pleasure in the surprise of encountering unexpected words. It is not every day that we encounter words and phrases like: egads, keto flu, natch, kvetch, ersatz, etc. Encountering these strange words within the constrained space of the acrostic allows wonder to assert itself within the ostensibly claustrophobic semantic container of the acrostic (see COVID below).
What effect might the repetition of the acrostic form have? It would be one thing for there to be one or two acrostics in this collection. In this book, however, the majority of the poems are acrostics, and acrostics that employ the same word. When thinking about this question, it’s hard not to consider Landau starting these poems in the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic during which she, like many others, was locked down. Against that background, one thinks of the destabilizing effect the lockdown had on many of us and how we turned to habitual patterning or ritual to bring some semblance of normalcy to our lives. In that sense, the exercise of writing the “same” acrostic over and over can be seen as a kind of self-soothing or means of controlling what feels out of control. In routine, we find stability. That is to say, the repeating acrostic is analogous to the spiritual strategies we might use, repetitive themselves—prayer, meditation—to contend with existential crises around human connection and mortality (thematic concerns in the book). In fact, the acrostic is thought to have been used as a mnemonic device in the preservation and transmission of sacred texts.
Despite the revelatory proposition of the acrostic, the repetition of the same word also speaks to the monotony of an enclosed life. The magic of the acrostic is diminished each time we encounter the same “Skeleton.” Enter the “Flesh” poems. If the acrostic “Skeleton” poems are expressions of the speaker’s discursive mind, the “Flesh” poems are sensuous, somatic embodiments. These are largely erotic poems which counterbalance the neuroses of the “Skeleton” poems. “Pleasure’s the perfect swerve. It wins you back” reads a line from one “Flesh” poem. “Every bliss is built this way…with many entrances, with blood pumping / a live tongue and limber torso, a fine sweat rising” reads another. As suggested by their title, these are poems grounded in the bodily experiences of the speaker, in contradistinction to the psychological, analytical mind-life of the speaker. They are the figurative meat on the bones of the “Skeleton.” As if to punctuate the distinction between these two kinds of experiences, the “Flesh” poems are set in a romantic (even sexy) serif font, while the “Skeleton” poems are set in a modernist, unornamental sans serif font (parenthetically, the “Ecstasies,” which can be seen as a conjoining of the two kinds of experiences, is set in serif for the section headers and sans serif for the poem body).
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:
Meanwhile we took good care, the greens were organic,
honey sweetened the pot, the membrane between us stayed transparent,
and we took seriously our allegiance to dream.
While the speaker of the “Skeleton” is obsessed with their immortality project (“Eager to stay, I take the kale and kombucha”), they have been transformed through the experiences of the “Flesh” and come out equanimous on the other end of the “Ecstasies” (“The body in its simple existence—lips, thighs, feet. / Birth and love and death, three songs.”). 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.”
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