University of Illinois Assistant Professor of English Corey Van Landingham has a new book of poetry, Reader, I, released today on Sarabande Books. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, take a look at this article from a few years back, and Serenity’s SPlog about her work being featured in The New Yorker last year. You can purchase the book here and read a little more about the book below:
Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë’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.
