Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens considers the way that the absence of touch-in acts of war via the drone, in acts of love via the sext, in aesthetics itself-abstracts the human body, transforming it into a proxy for the real.
"What love poem / could be written when men can no longer / look up?" this book asks, always in a state of flux between doubt and belief-in wars, in gods, in fathers, in love. Through epistolary addresses to these figures of power and others, these poems attempt to make bodies concrete and dangerous, immediate and addressable, once again.
"Corey Van Landingham's first book, Antidote, was an indelible reading event for me. Now I am again forever located in space and time through having experienced her exquisitely wrought poems. This memorable book is about how we perceive space and time, and how chillingly we are perceived within them-by our gods, lovers, governments and drones. Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens does what all the art I love best aims for, yoking the intimate with the historical, rightly acknowledging they are one and the same."
-Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore"In a world where drones are named for the messenger god, who is also the god of thieves, where a wedding celebration can be shattered by a missile fired by no one at all, in a world of destruction-by-proxy and a fever dream of omniscience, Corey Van Landingham gives us a beautiful, penetrating book of poems. These pages fairly shimmer with intelligence. And with something more important too: with insight that restores us to our senses."
-Linda Gregerson"In Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Corey Van Landingham follows love through all its hulking permutations. 'Hoe, mouth, man with hand in mouth: Egyptian hieroglyphic for love.' Van Landingham isn't afraid to look beyond the sayable into the heart's golden light. Visionary yet grounded, necessary yet rife with play, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens thunders with unearthly music.
-Quan Barry