"Landau's earthy, angsty poems — about sex and mortality and cosmic despair — are insistently quotable, and more fun than they have any right to be. One opens with a line Emily Dickinson might have written, had she been on Twitter: "Sorry not sorry, said death."  -- The New York Times Book Review              * The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2023"                         * STARRED REVIEW in   Publisher's Weekly               * The Best Recent Poetry, The Guardian Witty and glam, Skeletons is a prismatic collection  which shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humor and intimacy.  Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau's dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied with loneliness and mortality, Skeletons flashes with prismatic effect across the persistent allure of the flesh. Initiated during Brooklyn's early lockdown, the book reflects the increasingly troubling simultaneity of Eros and Thanatos, and the discontents of our virtual lives amidst the threats of a pandemic and corrosive politics. Spring blooms relentlessly while the ambulances siren by. Against the mounting pressure that propels the acrostic "Skeletons," a series of interstitial companion poems titled "Flesh" negotiate intimacy and desire. The collection culminates in an ecstatic sequence celebrating the love and connection that persist despite our fraught present moment. Shrugging off her own anxiety and disillusionment with characteristic humor and pitch-perfect cadence, Landau finds levity in pyrotechnic lines, sonic play, and a wholly original language, asking: "Any way outta this bag of bones?" "Landau's earthy, angsty poems — about sex and mortality and cosmic despair — are insistently quotable, and more fun than they have any right to be. One opens with a line Emily Dickinson might have written, had she been on Twitter: "Sorry not sorry, said death." -- The New York Times Book Review "In her shining fifth collection (after Soft Targets), Landau chooses the somewhat unexpected acrostic form as a container for her punchy riffs on modern life. Spelling 'skeleton' down the left margin, these poems wield a lightness of tone with subject matter that has preoccupied her across several books. . . . These poems unfurl a resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality." — Publisher's Weekly, STARRED REVIEW "By turns melancholy and exuberant, but always fuelled by formal and sonic play, this collection—structured around a sequence of "Skeleton" acrostics, punctuated by a series of "Flesh" interludes—measures the fact of mortality against the pleasures and possibilities of being alive. " —- The New Yorker, "Best Books of 2023" "An unnerving, strangely erotic reminder of what the pandemic felt like . . . a perfect reflection of those months of enforced intimacy amid the threat of death." —Washington Post "Landau's way with a line is exquisite. Spacing, lineation, and ellipsis regulate the rush or slow drip of the words, pacing our reading with the poet's thinking. Often, the form deprives readers of expected grammatical handholds, so we slide into the eye of the poem and her lush language. Most striking is the mouthfeel of the poems, whether arid or salivating, as in a poem about cherries: 'louche juice, farm to mouth, the sweetest cerise mess.' Skeletons is clever, pragmatic, and, finally, ecstatic about 'this bag of bones' we're bound —Barbara Engel, Booklist "Deborah Landau's fifth book goes down like a fine craft cocktail, cold and smooth, with a lingering burn....Landau showcases her signature edginess, wryly ruminating on "existential gloom," monogamy and its discontents, "the filth and joy" of living in a body...Landau's self-deprecating wit is so elegant we can't help but give in to her charms, entranced as she listens to Calm app mantras, fails at corpse pose, takes "the kale and kombucha." Skeletons sings most sublimely in its exaltation of desire. The whole collection is a fierce ode to mortality, mourning time's passage as it revels in the pleasures of the flesh, urging us to say yes despite everything: "The best time for the body is now." —- Electric Literature "Landau's skeletons are not only epigrammatic acrostic poems, but entire short stories, nuptial arrangements, drunken erotic meanderings.... Whether humour or misery or pleasure is explored, the collection reminds us that "these bones were made for us". A deeply contemporary and human book from a poet asking if we are "done with life", because she is "still so into it", and it shows. —-The Guardian, Best Recent Poetry "Deborah Landau's Skeletons wittily shows how, in our death-haunted loneliness (especially during COVID lockdown), we still reach for flowers, light, and love." — Library Journal , ("What To Read in 2023
LJ's Annual Books Preview") "Throughout this collection, Landau's stereoscopic vision splits: one eye stares into the void; the other stays trained