Enjoy two lovely reviews of Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I by our Poetry Editor & Assistant Poetry Editor.
The Heritage of Marriage: A Review of Reader, I
by Victoria Jean Reynolds
Van Landingham evokes a relationship with which all readers are familiar – the space between a narrator and the reader. Van Landingham uses this space to explore what it means to be a woman and to complicate the heritage of marriage. But, above all else, the main consideration of Van Landingham’s Reader, I is the idea that “I am not only I” (73). Reader, I navigates relationships in a way that feels shockingly honest, delightfully intimate. “Reader, I made my mother cry,” …
Part of the genius of Van Landingham’s repetition (through refrain, through title, through sound-patterning) is the way in which the reader is asked to engage with the work. Twenty four of the poems are addressed directly to the reader, but in other, more devious ways the repetition asks something of the reader. Take this section from “Reader, I [wore the past around my neck]:
“… and for once euphemism seemed a good cloak. Our vows were Roman. The color of my dress Antique. Diamonds from a great-aunt I never knew—sapphires, blue. No, I wore nothing at my throat. Except a belief that two syllables could save us” (15).
I do. The reader’s mind completes the triple rhyme that Van Landingham has hidden for us, bouncing from knew, to blue, to I do. Something about those particular repeated words hits home, perhaps in the ways it evokes the marriage rhyme “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” but also how all women know the precipice they stand on when falling in love with a man.
It is in these moments of music that Van Landingham asks the most of us.
Take this moment from “The Marriage Plot” –
“(here she returns
to the silver-haired man, here
they clink highballs
and he takes her hand
while the pianist limps
into another obvious tune)
was her catching my father
as he fell
from the hospital cot
in our living room”
The music here lulls the reader from the piano’s song into the end of a marriage, the til death do us part. But for our speaker, this is the marriage whose end is inevitable and most painful – the separation of her own parents through her father’s death.
What a gift to consider this collection. The ways in which it enters the heritage of poetry in tandem with the heritage of marriage fascinate and enthall. And, if I may say so – a pair of epigraphs has never done so much to set the stage for a poetry collection.
Reader, I: A Mythopoetic Journey Through Wifehood & Womanhood
by Taylor Franson-Thiel
At the risk of sounding too intellectual: this fucks.
“What won’t you do for love?”
Van Landingham wraps language around her ring finger and says “I Do,” holds a mirror to the roles of “wife” and “husband”. And we, readers, are sucked in by Van Landingham’s associative leaps and a tonality that is both archaic and immediate. In the opening poem entitled “Reader, I” Van Landingham sets up her recurring refrain and drops readers into a world of myth. Van Landingham writes “Sure, he grieves. Returns to the scalding city before finding her ghost. But never did he turn.” The “he” is at once thoughtless and haunted. “She will not return his gaze.” The “she” could be any woman, all women.
Even the title Reader, I sets up a tension that the collection is interested in pushing to its brink. Reader, I both centers the reader as the subject of the collection, as well as the “I” through the enjambment of the title into prose blocks. We, readers, are addressed and expected to journey with the “I” through her marriage, life, and through a mythopoetic lineage. The “I” carries the reader on her back and says look, look. Can you help me understand this? Van Landingham is “One of many, in a longest line, one of thousands of women to fuse herself to sorrow,” and from that sorrow, these poems emerge.
Alternating between the prose poems and lineated ones allows for propulsion through the collection. Each poem demands thorough attention and the direct reader address asks labor and intentionally from us. Weddings, motherhood, womanhood, are placed under the microscope eye of us, the careful readers and with Van Landingham we examine what it means to be married to something, or a mother to someone or how female bodies are permeated and inseparable from myth even as they make myth new. Van Landingham is able to make us see a bag of cheetos as a chalice of a God and a pink armchair as a throne.
One of my favorite moments of the whole collection comes in the poem “Reader, I [consider the octopus]” where Van Landingham writes “No one should expect a marriage to save her. No one should assume she can open the jar herself,” which seems to me to get at the pathos of the collection. Van Landingham wants to write poetry that allows for marriage to be a saving grace, and one of the circles of Dante’s hell. Wants both to reach toward a “husband” and away from one. It is at the nexus of these wants that the collection finds its feet, ringless and ringed.
As readers, we cannot help but be enamored with the speaker of these poems. At least I couldn’t help it. Beyond any craft chat, I simply loved this collection. “We emerged so into myth,” and in awe of Van Landingham’s propulsive and beautiful writing.
For “When she speaks she does not say nothing.”
Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, winner of the 2022 Levis Reading Prize, and Reader, I, published by Sarabande Books in 2024. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review and The New Yorker. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
Victoria Jean Reynolds is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University. Her work is forthcoming in South Carolina Review, Salt Hill, Raleigh Review, Pinch and Muzzle. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for phoebe and Stillhouse Press. You can find her on Instagram at toreyntial.
Taylor Franson-Thiel is the author of “Bone Valley Hymnal” (ELJ Editions 2025). She is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found @TaylorFranson on Twitter, @taylorfthiel on Instagram, @taylorfthiel.bsky.social on BlueSky, and at taylorfranson-thiel.com