Splashed Things - by Leigh Lucas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Splashed Things is a raw, dark humored, and deeply moving debut poetry collection that examines the chaotic terrain of grief following the suicide of a close friend and former lover. With startling honesty and emotional precision, Lucas navigates the speaker's journey through loss as a woman in her 20s, revealing how grief infiltrates every corner of her life--from the funeral home to a dead-end job, from the therapist's office to the subways of New York City.

These poems search for traces of the departed in unlikely places--the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, the science of depression--while confronting the limitations of elegy and the futility of trying to contain sorrow in words. Splashed Things is not a neat arc toward healing, but a testimony to the unwieldy shape of mourning and the persistence of love in its wake.

Selected by Maya C. Popa as winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for its emotional courage, inventive language, and haunting beauty, Leigh Lucas's Splashed Things marks the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry. The collection also includes a foreword by Popa, offering a profound and generous meditation on the book's emotional depth and poetic achievement.

Review Quotes

"A child's hand in a fat grip on a fat crayon, puncturing crêpe paper" is how our speaker describes their poems. But our speaker is cataclysmically clever, and while these poems tolerate no fragile surface, their majesty far exceeds this devastating premise, allowing us into the private sacrifices a woman makes to protect the life that follows the death of the beloved. Never alone, and certainly never entirely defeated, Leigh Lucas renders the defiance, doubt, and ambition required to go on in grief with tenderheartedness and venom, humor hewn from absurdity and a sharpness of mind. Lucas reaches for complete transformation, gasping her new life with all that poetry empowers, and is most impressively real when everything fails. 'The world will be unsettled, ' our poet observes. 'I will unsettle them.'" --Paul Tran

"Leigh Lucas transmits the lasting shockwaves of grief: the anger and bitterness, blame and shame, its landsickness, and the empty shapes into which we accumulate the things left, inside the private rooms we build around the negative space grief leaves in our lives. The memories called up again and again, involuntary, changing shape each time, words once spoken replaced with new words, drawing us both closer and farther away from who and what we miss. These poems are falling apart for love, are devastatingly honest, naked, bleeding, and brutally self-searching. I'll think about them forever." --Sarah Gerard

About the Author

Leigh Lucas is the author of Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024), selected by Chen Chen for the Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. The recipient of residencies from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Adroit, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Stanford and Warren Wilson's MFA program and lives in San Francisco.