The therapeutic creative practices of the bereaved are often—and rightly—more about expressing the knottiness of emotion surrounding individual loss than about the results of the artistic process being assessed publicly. This said, when grief is one of the forces driving a work of undeniable complexity and depth, that work is certainly worth public notice as well as critical attention. Leigh Lucas’s 2024 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning collection Splashed Things depicts the experiences of a woman whose partner took his own life when he jumped “off a bridge on September 30th at 4 in the afternoon” (22), and is certainly worthy of attention.
Aptly titled, even despite the circumstances which surround the book’s genesis, Leigh’s collection has a remarkably fluid quality. The content of one poem spills and puddles into the next, the work’s meaning cumulative rather than immediate. None of the pieces comprising Leigh’s full-length debut are titled, and each of them gives the impression of notes written for various purposes: sometimes to recollect, at others to purge or to heal, and sometimes, justifiably, out of anger. In the poem that opens LEACH, the second of the collection’s eight different sections, Leigh writes, “Some believe numbers govern splashes: / A high Reynolds number makes them tall; a high Weber number makes them messy” (27), which offers insight into what affects and structures readers will encounter while reading this collection. Reynolds numbers and Weber numbers are both indicative of equations within fluid mechanics. The poems open to the reader, puddle-like, and once disturbed, catch and refract the motifs within the collection—and the reading is messy, though meaningfully so.
Lucas’s chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press) makes a reprisal of sorts in Splashed Things. Much of the heart of that earlier work, described as a lyric essay, works to animate the life of the poems here. Following the publication of that earlier work, Lucas explained during an interview with Laurel McCaull in The Racket that Landsickness is “actually . . . sections of a longer manuscript” (Nov. 19, 2024). What the reader experiences with Splashed Things involves the full range of an individual’s grieving and healing processes. EBB, the first section, places us in the midst of the speaker’s lingering trauma. No further than the second poem of the collection, following one that Leigh opens with a comment about a new life in which the speaker “must learn everything again” (15), Leigh writes,
“I take the long, dumb walk to work,
Bring my bad attitude and forget my keys and wallet. My
new uniform is a gray sweater that doubles as sleepwear. I
smoke with my hair down so the smell stays.
Performing the required movements to remain employed, I lob
needless lies at coworkers who dare come my way. I put
a stapler in my purse” (16).
The first response of those who are unfamiliar with Leigh’s previous work will wonder what the bitterness and cynicism, deeply satisfying as it may be in a weirdly comic kind of way, signifies, but by pages 22 and 23, we come to understand the utterly devastating origins of the speaker’s anomie, a devastation which is amplified by the spare lines, “He sank // Like a man // Of stone” (23).
Notwithstanding the rawness and the seeming unpolished qualities of Lucas’s poems, it takes only a single reading to conclude that these pieces are carefully constructed and organized. Each of the collection’s different sections are titled by a nautical term, or one that otherwise connotes some phenomenon related to water. It is not by chance that the first poems of Splashed Things leave us uncertain what literary terrain we’ve stepped into, because once we’re faced by the fact that the speaker’s partner has ended his own life, we are disconcerted, thrown overboard into a kind of confusion that of course can never approach the variety experienced by the speaker, but which, in some ways, simulates a parallel experience literarily. After we’ve gained some insight into the trauma the speaker has experienced, we’re made to follow her process of coming to terms with her own continued life, and the loss felt to resonate through it.
The complexities of the aftermath left to the speaker is laid bare for the reader, though it would be wrong to consider this as if it were just another example of what’s commonly known as “trauma porn.” The reason is that Leigh renders the entirety of a devastating experience as a complex multi-dimensional state. In various sections of Splashed Things, Leigh has her speaker comment upon her partner’s ex-girlfriends while attending his funeral; recollect the identification of his body, while also acknowledging and imagining the impact it has on his immediate family; obsess over memories of him and the nature of corporeality, both his and as such, more generally; but Leigh also animates the counseling and therapy sessions she attends later with “Dr. Kate.” It is here that an important connective trope emerges, that of “landsickness” or “drunken sailor syndrome.” The importance behind this becomes apparent through Leigh’s juxtaposition of poems, particularly when she writes, “A brain that experiences a New Bad Thing contorts itself to / insulate from Future Similar Bad Things” (70). “Landsickness” is the speaker’s way of understanding how her thoughts are working against her, as a defense mechanism, much the way a brain overcompensates for motion on dry land after an extended period of traveling on open water.
In the final sections of the collection, we watch the speaker move beyond her grief. The poetic notes that compose Splashed Things take on distinct linearity, and it becomes clear that the speaker is on a trajectory to accepting and incorporating her former partner’s suicide. The point of all this is best described by the poet herself: “Not to preserve him exactly. // Not to forget. Eye pits, no eyes. // Maybe the aim is just to come out from living in this room between he and not-he” (87). Obviously the point of this collection is not to create a work that wallows in what could have been, or to linger in the past so deeply that the speaker becomes a ghost in the present. One of the final pieces of the collection demonstrates this succinctly. The reader faces a final jump in time and space when the speaker reports that “These days I live in a home looking over the bay with a / beautiful man and a beautiful baby” and “She is so much more than our proof of survival” (88). At the heart of Splashed Things, then, is a kind of homage to life, even when one’s life is splashed by grief.
