Description
Book SynopsisSarah 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
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
