Say the answer to the impossible equation is X. Now, let’s say you are solving for your life, an origin that feels constructed of absence. Such is the ferocity with which Sarah Audsley’s brave debut moves, formally active in its interrogation; it is as if somewhere—in poetry, in art, in translation—there is a combination for righting the painful history of adoption, for learning to live simultaneously with and against. “Why, even now, do I practice this insistence on beauty?” the poet asks. And I cannot say how glad I am she does insist. As difficult as the subject matter is, these poems move me toward a kind of relief. “It’s never enough just to love.” Landlock X is the evidence.
— Sally Keith, author of River House
“Nothing about hunger is passive,” writes Sarah Audsley in this deft debut. That a poet as versed in detail and Image would choose to write within the pastoral tradition is not surprising. What surprises, however, is the way Audsley uses the pastoral as a vehicle to express many griefs: loss of a mother; loss of a country; loss of a culture; and even loss of a way of life. Despite an abundance of grief, Landlock X stands not as simple elegy but as a triumph of the self. This is a powerful collection.
— C. Dale Young, author of Prometeo
In this stunning debut collection, Sarah Audsley shapes a narrative out of an incomplete history
and creates a living artifact, forging a history for herself and her family. “I am the X / inside a body,” she writes, but the poems offer no easy solutions. In her explorations of the various forces that create and define a self, these poems remind us how history is never simply individual, but communal. Landlock X is a testament to the act of writing as an act of love.
— Christine Kitano, author of Sky Country
In Landlock X, Sarah Audsley makes of lyric an intimate journey toward an impossible beginning. Toward what it means to belong, to see (and be seen), to insist on connection—fraught and forged—in and through profound severance. I am so moved by how, where reclamation may not be an option, Audsley intervenes with imagination, intellectual and emotional breadth, and courage, to "choose [her] own extent." This work simultaneously indicts and consoles; it roams colors, oceans, flowers, the black holes of lineage and nation(s), and stands its ground. "Almost drowning is touching creation," writes the poet, and I am compelled to reconsider the solidities I take for granted. To be alive.
— Cynthia Dewi Oka, author of Fire Is Not a Country
Sarah Audsley’s Landlock X is a book I wish I had been able to read years ago. With language sharp and lucid as a cut gem, these poems spin the yellows of hay and light into gold and pursue difficult questions and answers without flinching. Audsley’s precise excavations of personal history, through archival images and such forms as the sijo and haibun, examine what facts remain after erasure and translation have scraped away at memory. In this brilliant field of poems, each moon is a face or a flipped rabbit, the distances between “I” and “you” and “X” are measurable, and home becomes strange as strangers become home. This book calls across time and oceans and listens for your response. “[Y]ou, dear adoptee, are not alone. / I am lonely, too.”
— Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, author of The Hour of the Ox
REVIEWS & PRESS
Ploughshares Editors’ Shelf Recommendation: Eleanor Wilner recommends Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023) by Sarah Audsley. “Poems of searing insight into the intimate, often wounding experience of a Korean American adoptee, torn at the roots, with the face of a culture she has never known and that sets her apart. Both revealing and reclaiming a life through the brilliance of its formal inventions, fierce lyric power, and its unsparing candor, poetry seldom demonstrates so powerfully its own necessity and value; ultimately, as she writes near the book’s close: ‘those who make their own light invent the proportions they desire.’”
New England Review - Winter 2022-2023 New Books by NER Authors
A NOTABLE BOOK BY ASIAN AMERICAN POETS TO ANTICIPATE IN 2023