Splashed Things

“In my new life, I must learn everything again,” begins Splashed Things, Leigh Lucas’s dark humored and deeply moving debut that examines the chaotic terrain of grief following the suicide of a former boyfriend. With startling honesty and emotional precision, these poems tell the story of a woman in her twenties navigating loss, from the funeral service and her dead-end job, to her therapist’s office and the subways of New York City, revealing the way her beloved’s death infiltrates every corner of her life.

The speaker searches for traces of the departed in unlikely places—the physics of
splashes, the history of seasickness, the science of depression—while confronting the
limitations of elegy and the futility of trying to contain sorrow in words. Splashed Things
is not a neat arc toward healing, but a testimony to the unwieldy shape of mourning and
the persistence of love in its wake.

Selected by Maya C. Popa as winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for its emotional
courage, inventive language, and haunting beauty, Leigh Lucas’s Splashed Things marks
the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry.

Praise for Splashed Things

"'I sing so he can cry,' writes Leigh Lucas in Splashed Things, her lucid portrait of a young woman devastated by great and unexpected loss. Into these deftly built and deeply moving poems, Lucas alchemizes the memory of grief and the grief of memory, with restraint, irreverence, and a devotion so total that I can only understand it as love. I don’t know a single person who could read this book with an open heart and mind and not be made more human.” —Charif Shanahan, Whiting Award-winning author of Trace Evidence: Poems

“'A child’s hand in a fat grip on a fat crayon, puncturing crêpe paper' is how our speaker describes their poems. But our speaker is cataclysmically clever, and while these poems tolerate no fragile surface, their majesty far exceeds this devastating premise, allowing us into the private sacrifices a woman makes to protect the life that follows the death of the beloved. Never alone, and certainly never entirely defeated, Leigh Lucas renders the defiance, doubt, and ambition required to go on in grief with tenderheartedness and venom, humor hewn from absurdity and a sharpness of mind. Lucas reaches for complete transformation, grasping her new life with all that poetry empowers, and is most impressively real when everything fails. 'The world will be unsettled,' our poet observes. 'I will unsettle them.'” —Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

"Leigh Lucas transmits the lasting shockwaves of grief: the anger and bitterness, blame and shame, its landsickness, and the empty shapes into which we accumulate the things left, inside the private rooms we build around the negative space grief leaves in our lives. The memories called up again and again, involuntary, changing shape each time, words once spoken replaced with new words, drawing us both closer and farther away from who and what we miss. These poems are falling apart for love, are devastatingly honest, naked, bleeding, and brutally self-searching. I'll think about them forever." —Sarah Gerard, author of Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable

Splashed Things [Page 27]

What happens to a body thrown?

Some believe numbers govern splashes:

A high Reynolds number makes them tall; a high Weber number makes them messy. 

I appreciate attempts to lasso a slippery world, to number, measure, and taxonomize.

My own complex systems of ordering his belongings and memorizing minutia are for putting myself through punishing mental tests of recalling exact details of his poems, drawings and letters, of his feet, palms, and the curve of his back. 

I transcribe his words into notebooks and save them to hard drives, inboxes, and every other place I know about on the internet. Tangible Items are arranged and rearranged in various safekeeping spots. Still nothing is ever safe.

When you possess a brain like cheese, things go missing quickly. 

My mother grows accustomed to my panicked calls: 
—I promise, it’s not lost. You’ll find it when you’re ready to find it again.

I am pitiful at my sole pursuit: 
                                                                        Nothing must disappear.