Landlock X: Poems

by Sarah Audsley

Overview

-Finalist in the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Poetry

Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience—her own—Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging to the rural landscape—despite the inheritance of displacement and removal from a country of origin—Landlock X tries to solve for all of the (adoptee’s) variables and knows it is an impossible task that the “I”, “you”, and “we” of the poems only approximate.
...
From “The Black Cows in the Foreground”
it is unknown
where the bones
of your mother
turned to fragments

none in the painting
of the black cows
so where to grieve
her body

no parcel of land
to plant sorrow
in furrowed rows
the black cows graze

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680033052
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	02/17/2023
Edition description:	1
Pages:	70
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

SARAH AUDSLEY, a Korean American adoptee raised in rural Vermont, has received support from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, and a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. Her work appears in New England Review, The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a member of The Starlings Collective, she lives and works in Johnson, VT.

Read an Excerpt

From “The Black Cows in the Foreground”
 
it is unknown
where the bones
of your mother
turned to fragments
 
none in the painting
of the black cows
so where to grieve
her body
 
no parcel of land
to plant sorrow
in furrowed rows
the black cows graze
 

Table of Contents

• [ untranslated ] ix
• I. F I E L D
  • In the X Pastoral 1
  • Crown of Yellow 2
  • Greenhousing 4
  • Case Number: K83-5XX 5
  • Primary Color 6
  • On Creating False Memory 7
  • Swarm 8
  • Letter to the Woman on the Plane 10
  • Moonface Phases 11
  • Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos 12
  • While in Miryang, Searching 14
  • Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse 16
  • [ translation/1 ] 17
• II. D R E S S
  • Confessional 20
  • On Not Fitting In 21
  • It Was a Yellow Light 22
  • Lament for Some Other Saigon 23
  • Letter To My Adoptee Diaspora 25
  • Broken Palette :: a retrospective in panels 26
  • On Meeting My Biological Father 33
  • Korea Doll Box 34
  • [American] Sampler 35
  • Dear Connie Chung 36
  • Beauty Being Beauty 37
  • Continuum 38
  • Field Dress Portal 39
  • [ translation/2 ] 40
• III. P O R T A L
  • Six Persimmons 44
  • Anti-Pastoral 45
  • Initial Gestures 46
  • “Now, where are you from?” 49
  • Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2018 50
  • We (or in the Blue House) 51
  • Planet Nine, a primordial black hole, new research suggests— 52
  • The Black Cows in the Foreground 53
  • The Half-Sister, Unmet 55
  • Fishheads (or Fuckheads) 56
  • Caspian Lake 57
  • Notes on Garnets 61
  • [ translation/3 ] 62
  • When My Mother Returns as X 63
  • Waiting Children 64
• Notes 66
• Acknowledgments 68
• With Gratitude 69

What People are Saying About This

C. Dale Young

“‘Nothing about hunger is passive,’ writes Sarah Audsley in this deft debut. That a poet as versed in detail and Image would choose to write within the pastoral tradition is not surprising. What surprises, however, is the way Audsley uses the pastoral as a vehicle to express many griefs: loss of a mother; loss of a country; loss of a culture; and even loss of a way of life. Despite an abundance of grief, Landlock X stands not as simple elegy but as a triumph of the self. This is a powerful collection.”
—C. Dale Young, author of Prometeo
 

Sally Keith

“Say the answer to the impossible equation is X. Now, let’s say you are solving for your life, an origin that feels constructed of absence. Such is the ferocity with which Sarah Audsley’s brave debut moves, formally active in its interrogation; it is as if somewhere—in poetry, in art, in translation—there is a combination for righting the painful history of adoption, for learning to live simultaneously with and against. ‘Why even now do I practice this insistence on beauty?’ the poet asks. And I cannot say how glad I am she does insist. As difficult as the subject matter is, these poems move me toward a kind of relief. ‘It’s never just enough to love.’ Landlock X is the evidence.”
—Sally Keith, author of River House

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

“Sarah Audsley’s Landlock X is a book I wish I had been able to read years ago. With language sharp and lucid as a cut gem, these poems spin the yellows of hay and light into gold and pursue difficult questions and answers without flinching. Audsley’s precise excavations of personal history, through archival images and such forms as the sijo and haibun, examine what facts remain after erasure and translation have scraped away at memory. In this brilliant field of poems, each moon is a face or a flipped rabbit, the distances between ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘X’ are measurable, and home becomes strange as strangers become home. This book calls across time and oceans and listens for your response. ‘[Y]ou, dear adoptee, are not alone. / I am lonely, too.’”
—Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, author of The Hour of the Ox

Christine Kitano

“In this stunning debut collection, Sarah Audsley shapes a narrative out of an incomplete history and creates a living artifact, forging a history for herself and her family. ‘I am the X / inside a body,’ she writes, but the poems offer no easy solutions. In her explorations of the various forces that create and define a self, these poems remind us how history is never simply individual, but communal. Landlock X is a testament to the act of writing as an act of love.”
—Christine Kitano, author of Sky Country

Cynthia Dewi Oka

"In Landlock X, Sarah Audsley makes of lyric an intimate journey toward an impossible beginning. Toward what it means to belong, to see (and be seen), to insist on connection—fraught and forged—in and through profound severance. I am so moved by how, where reclamation may not be an option, Audsley intervenes with imagination, intellectual and emotional breadth, and courage, to 'choose [her] own extent.' This work simultaneously indicts and consoles; it roams colors, oceans, flowers, the black holes of lineage and nation(s), and stands its ground. 'Almost drowning is touching creation,' writes the poet, and I am compelled to reconsider the solidities I take for granted. To be alive."
—Cynthia Dewi Oka, author of Fire Is Not a Country

Editorial Reviews

"In Sarah Audsley’s heart-stopping debut poetry collection, Landlock X, the evocation of Vermont is so real you can smell and feel it, of growing up Asian in a white world so recognizable you can cry over it, and of being adopted so vivid you feel seen, understood, and validated."
—Alice Stephens in Washington Independent Review of Books
 

Washington Independent Review of Books - Alice Stephens

"When Sarah [Audsley] took the stage, I was moved by the power of her voice and of her poetry."
—Bo Hee Moon in Tinderbox Poetry
 

Tinderbox Poetry Journal - Bo Hee Moon

"Debut collections mark an irreversible moment in a poet’s career, even while the previous years of labor and individually published poems testify to both resilience and talent." 
—Foreword Reviews

Matt Sutherland

"In Landlock X, Sarah Audsley makes of lyric an intimate journey toward an impossible beginning. Toward what it means to belong, to see (and be seen), to insist on connection—fraught and forged—in and through profound severance. I am so moved by how, where reclamation may not be an option, Audsley intervenes with imagination, intellectual and emotional breadth, and courage, to 'choose [her] own extent.' This work simultaneously indicts and consoles; it roams colors, oceans, flowers, the black holes of lineage and nation(s), and stands its ground. 'Almost drowning is touching creation,' writes the poet, and I am compelled to reconsider the solidities I take for granted. To be alive."
—Cynthia Dewi Oka, author of Fire Is Not a Country

“Say the answer to the impossible equation is X. Now, let’s say you are solving for your life, an origin that feels constructed of absence. Such is the ferocity with which Sarah Audsley’s brave debut moves, formally active in its interrogation; it is as if somewhere—in poetry, in art, in translation—there is a combination for righting the painful history of adoption, for learning to live simultaneously with and against. ‘Why even now do I practice this insistence on beauty?’ the poet asks. And I cannot say how glad I am she does insist. As difficult as the subject matter is, these poems move me toward a kind of relief. ‘It’s never just enough to love.’ Landlock X is the evidence.”
—Sally Keith, author of River House

“‘Nothing about hunger is passive,’ writes Sarah Audsley in this deft debut. That a poet as versed in detail and Image would choose to write within the pastoral tradition is not surprising. What surprises, however, is the way Audsley uses the pastoral as a vehicle to express many griefs: loss of a mother; loss of a country; loss of a culture; and even loss of a way of life. Despite an abundance of grief, Landlock X stands not as simple elegy but as a triumph of the self. This is a powerful collection.”
—C. Dale Young, author of Prometeo

“In this stunning debut collection, Sarah Audsley shapes a narrative out of an incomplete history and creates a living artifact, forging a history for herself and her family. ‘I am the X / inside a body,’ she writes, but the poems offer no easy solutions. In her explorations of the various forces that create and define a self, these poems remind us how history is never simply individual, but communal. Landlock X is a testament to the act of writing as an act of love.”
—Christine Kitano, author of Sky Country

“Sarah Audsley’s Landlock X is a book I wish I had been able to read years ago. With language sharp and lucid as a cut gem, these poems spin the yellows of hay and light into gold and pursue difficult questions and answers without flinching. Audsley’s precise excavations of personal history, through archival images and such forms as the sijo and haibun, examine what facts remain after erasure and translation have scraped away at memory. In this brilliant field of poems, each moon is a face or a flipped rabbit, the distances between ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘X’ are measurable, and home becomes strange as strangers become home. This book calls across time and oceans and listens for your response. ‘[Y]ou, dear adoptee, are not alone. / I am lonely, too.’”
—Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, author of The Hour of the Ox

From the Publisher

The self that multiplies. The self that becomes. Audsley’s collection explores—in the most multifaceted, complex, open-hearted, and probing ways I can imagine—the poet’s identity and personal history, including her identity as a Korean American adoptee, as a rural New Englander, and as an artist.”
—Lizzy Beck in LEON Literary Review

LEON Literary Review - Lizzy Beck

Poems of searing insight into the intimate, often wounding experience of a Korean American adoptee, torn at the roots, with the face of a culture she has never known and that sets her apart. Both revealing and reclaiming a life through the brilliance of its formal inventions, fierce lyric power, and its unsparing candor, poetry seldom demonstrates so powerfully its own necessity and value; ultimately, as she writes near the book’s close: ‘those who make their own light invent the proportions they desire.’”
—Eleanor Wilner in Ploughshares

Ploughshares - Eleanor Wilner

…in Landlock X, Sarah Audsley appears to have unlocked herselves and has shared those selves with us.”
—Tom Holmes in The Line Break

The Line Break - Tom Holmes