A Landscape for Loss

Selected as winner of the National Federation of State Poetry Society‘s 2016 Stevens Manuscript Competition by Dr. Tony Barnstone

“The sky is filled with alchemy and the streets with moped centaurs in this sorcerous, punning, occasionally flamboyant book focused on the author’s time in Vietnam decades after the war–Saigon turned into “Sigh gone,the sound / of something you never really grasped / leaving you.”  It is a book that scratches at the gutter economics of sex work and “the ghost-itch of the war / that goes on where we can’t end it.”  It is a book that like “the War Remnants Museum, formerly the Museum of American War Crimes”is filled with exhibits and atrocities and elegies, but also of the grace that also goes on and doesn’t end, and that swells, pregnant, with hope. It is an amazing book, one that shows us how much can still be gained from a landscape of loss.” — Tony Barnston

“The poems in A Landscape for Loss are exquisite in their grasp of amplitude and absence, their graceful shifts of scale between the intimate and monumental, their ruminations of space journeyed through with ghosts, their ease in housing the paradox of birth and death in the female body mirrored in the vast, historical landscapes of loss and desire. Textured with the delicacy and strength it takes to bear the weight of life, this book by Erin Rodoni is a work of genuine beauty.” Shadab Zeest Hashmi, author Baker of Tarifa

“Every once in a while a book comes along that reminds me of why I read poetry, restores me in some deep way, and Erin Rodoni’s A Landscape for Loss is just such a book. Precise, deeply intelligent, often profoundly elegiac, many of these poems left me breathless: in their honesty, certainly, but also in their craft, their sense of line, their kinetic energy. Rodoni’s freshly metaphoric poems exist as if vertically layered, membraned in a glass through which both reader and author apprehend the world. The result is a journey that engages on every page–moves both mind and heart. I loved this book.” — Gerald Fleming, author of One

“In all, A Landscape for Loss is a gripping collection of poetry, making fascinating and unexpected connections between the blunt destruction of war and the deeper, less visible scars left by human experience. Rodoni’s attention to craft calls for multiple, deep readings to fully appreciate the intricacy of her work.”–Issa M. Lewis, Mom Egg Review