South Bound, Poems by Luann Landon

The elegant poems of Luann Landon's South Bound create an entire, resonant world of lived and shaped experience, colored by the tones of the South.

Sample Poems by Luann Landon

"Reading through this collection of elegant formal poems that feels like a page-turner, I found myself identifying with a huge cast characters who are ordinarily far from my experience and nothing like the people I know. It's a tribute to the narrative and dramatic gifts of poet Luann Landon that I became, on page after page, the landowners and suicides, complicated servants and their masters, adoring but toxically possessive mothers, varied fathers and their conflicted sons and daughters, well-bred Southern ladies, the suitors they mourn and the selves they reinvent in memory, the descendants of Civil War widows, and other personages so psychologically compelling that they beg for the novel from which they seem to have escaped. But the genius of the author resides precisely in simply creating the characters, sketching in their circumstances and motives in poems that tell just enough, whether as third-person accounts or dramatic monologues, and then letting the reader imagine his own version of that missing novel. During a second delighted reading, I caught myself trying to decide how the many sub-plots ought to be combined, and inventing dialogue between the figures presented in separate poems. This book is a treat and challenge to the imagination, and a pure pleasure."--Rhina P. Espaillat

"As the punning title of this book indicates, Luann Landon both takes us on a journey to the American South and illuminates lives of those bound by the history and customs of the region. Some poems, like the wonderfully rendered 'Hotspur,' are compressed tragedies of people who struggle unsuccessfully against difficult circumstances and self-defeating choices. Other poems, like 'A New Woman in Town,' feature sly, satirical humor. Still others, like 'The House in Nashville,' warmly observe family relations. Whatever the tone, Landon writes with appealing sympathy and humanity."--Timothy Steele

ISBN: 978-1625491725, 84 pages, $18

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