Remarkable is the only word that does this collection justice. As someone who has not yet experienced great loss, I was struck by the trust with which the speaker lays her grief bare to readers. I also adored the narrative structure the poems followed, which created a story-like feel with tangible characters. While reading through this collection, I felt like I was drifting through the speaker’s memories—from utterly beautiful glimpses of love to shattering recollections of the absence of the one who bore it. To use the speaker’s metaphor, grief is like seasickness: “…a dissonance between expectations and actuality.”
This collection moved me because of its candor, sensitivity, and resounding idea that when you lose someone, you never stop loving them. The speaker of
Splashed Things de
scribes her poems as “A child’s hand in a fat grip on a fat crayon, puncturing crêpe paper,” but I believe quite the opposite. Our speaker’s poems are deft, palpable, and unmistakably human. She is the “gorgeously ballooning creature” her love always saw her as.
For those navigating the loss of a loved one, Splashed Things offers consolation for its deeply honest depictions of the messy path toward healing and seemingly endless shockwaves of grief that follow. For those who have not yet experienced such a loss, this collection offers a lens with which we can begin to understand and support others who have. It would be a shame to miss out on this beautiful collection. Be sure to purchase a copy of SPLASHED THINGS on our website, boaeditions.org.
Hannah Kailburn is a recent graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature and received awards for her writing. You can find her poetry published in North Star Magazine. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys hiking, skiing, and getting lost in fantasy novels.
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Who, or what, do we become in the aftermath of losing a precious piece of our hearts? How do we make it through the agonizing stages of grief and find the strength to move on? The speaker shares her recipe for survival with refreshing candidness in this brutally honest collection of poems documenting her journey through the loss of her ex-boyfriend’s life. I found Splashed Things to be meditative, direct, and forthcoming, each poem revealing a new piece of the speaker's grief and healing.
Once upon a time, the speaker of Splashed Things was just a girl in love, and she couldn't imagine an empty hole in place of her lover. That all changed one day as the man that she loved took his own life, leaving not just her but everyone he knew and cared for in the aftermath of his departure. Even if you can’t relate to the author’s specific experience, we have all met grief and held its hand for however long, to whatever degree. There is something to relate to within these poems for anyone who has felt the sharp burn, then the dull ache of loss and moving on.
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. You feel each of these stages in their chronological happening throughout this collection, poems perfectly ordered into the author's cohesive walk with grief. Despite being composed of poetry rather than prose, Splashed Things reads like a novel, its story coherent in verse.
One thing I’ve learned about grief is that it never leaves. But you learn to live with it. And in this collection, Leigh Lucas shows us how.
Leah Joy is a Boa fall intern and a contributor to CITY Magazine. They hold a degree in Creative Writing from Finger Lakes Community College. When they aren’t writing, they can be found doting on their cats, dancing with their friends, or watching a mid 2000’s horror movie.
