Mercies in the American Desert

Benjamin Landry is the author of Particle and Wave, shortlisted for the Believer Poetry Award, and Burn Lyrics. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is visiting assistant professor of creative writing in poetry at SUNY-Potsdam.

The speaker of these thoughtful, accomplished poems raises complex moral questions, bears witness. The most haunting poems detail human diminution. Mercies like beauty and love appear only to disappear, and the American desire for transcendence remains, but in tatters. Poems we need to read again and again.--Martha Ronk These are perfectly gorgeous poems. They are everything that real poetry is and should be: all truth, beauty, shining intelligence, medicine and mystery and heart-stopping surprises. This is the work of a genuinely gifted poet at the height of his powers. A beautiful gathering.--Lorna Goodison Landry is not afraid of reality because reality affords him the great possibility to make poems of linguistic intimacy. Mercies in the American Desert quietly celebrates how perception gathers itself into tissues of connection, and we are the lucky recipients of his merciful, lucid gifts.--Ann Lauterbach Landry's Mercies in the American Desert engages seriously with the bewilderment of the present moment--its speakers can see something, everything, has gone wrong with America and being American, but they cannot adapt because the wrong outstrips compensatory adaptation. These are poems of rare honesty, rare integrity.--Shane McCrae With acute attention to the rights and rites of the nonhuman world, Landry explores and refines the notion of accountability in sharply insightful yet openly compassionate poems. How love can work within, between, and among us to constantly enlarge the meaning of us is a central question that drives the work, and he trains that question with invariable accuracy equally on the shreds left behind by human error and on the surprising persistence of the varied lifeforms that thrive among them.--Cole Swensen