READER, I
The Rumpus, "The Most Beautiful Books of 2023"
Literary Hub, "Here Are the Poetry Books to Read in 2024"
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Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: "Reader, I married him." Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker—tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover—finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.​​​​​​
​"Wickedly learned, Corey Van Landingham's Reader, I is a tome chock full of literary allusion and so terrifyingly clever it offers for serious readers of poetry intense pleasure. Imagine Shakespeare's sonnet sequence mated with a stack of bridal magazines. Imagine Dickinson ghostwriting Martha Stewart."
—Cate Marvin
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"Hers are poems of identity and cultural bearing, negotiating selfhood within (and without) the institutions of nation and marriage, citizenship and readership, winking, promising, and enlightening all the way."
—David Baker
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"The real gift of this work is Van Landingham's ability to transform the mundane into that which is sacred through a kind of plain-spokenness that makes the entire text look like magic."
—Jericho Brown
"Acerbically humorous and occasionally melancholy, Corey Van Landingham's Reader, I examines the absurd conventions of heteronormative marriage. We feel its historic and cultural freight lurking around every corner."
—Nicky Beer
LOVE LETTER TO WHO OWNS THE HEAVENS
Winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize
"Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens does what all the art I love best aims for, yoking the intimate with the historical, rightly acknowledging they are one and the same."
​—Kathy Fagan
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"Visionary yet grounded, necessary yet rife with play, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens thunders with unearthly music."​
—Quan Barry
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"These pages fairly shimmer with intelligence. And with something more important too: with insight that restores us to our senses."
—Linda Gregerson
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ANTIDOTE
Winner of the 2012 The Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Poetry Award
Antidote named one of The Believer Readers Survey Best Works of Poetry in 2013
Flavorwire chooses Antidote for one of the 50 Essential Works of Poetry That Everyone Should Read
Antidote listed as one of the 30 Best Books Written By Millennials