Description

Sarabande Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 16, 2024

Publisher Marketing: A brand new collection from multi-award winning poet Corey Van Landingham. Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Bront’s Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker–tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover–finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.