K.T. Landon’s Abide is a poetry collection about mortality, grief, and the unexpected joy that can emerge from moving through loss. Written over the course of a decade, the poems reckon with the death of Landon’s sister, her own cancer diagnosis, marriage, faith, and memory while finding humor and moments of transcendence in everyday life.
Landon’s poems have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Best New Poets, among others. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a reader for Lily Poetry Review.
The poet answered our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Obsession might not be a strong enough word for my feelings about Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. It made me want to be a writer, though as a child I wanted to be Beth, not Jo (long story). I remember being told in third grade by the school librarian that I was too young to read it and feeling pretty smug because I had already read my mother’s copy, inscribed to her “from Aunt Agnes and Uncle Verdo,” multiple times. I’ve since seen most of the movie adaptations multiple times—Greta Gerwig’s is the best and I will brook no argument on the subject—and I still read the book once a year.
What book helped you through puberty?
The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis. This was the first series where I really noticed the writer’s craft (I mean, Lewis kind of hits you over the head with the metaphor, so maybe it was hard to miss), and it made me start looking more closely at how writing worked. I remember reading it at camp—I hated camp and was the kid who sat on the sidelines reading instead of watching the softball game—and trying to explain it to some other campers who, it turned out, were only getting me to talk about it so they could make fun of me. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the complicated characters and their resilience were a message my judgy and unsubtle adolescent self needed to hear.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
I wish 16-year-old me had read any contemporary poetry. I’m not sure I knew that anyone wrote poetry that wasn’t an imitation of Tennyson or Frost until after I graduated from college. I once heard Marie Howe say something like, “Poetry says everything we cannot say,” and adolescent me had so much that seemed unsayable. I think I would have loved her work then, as I do now.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
This question terrifies me, because I’ll definitely remember some crucial book two minutes after I press Send. That said, I love writing that engages my heart and mind equally, and I value surprise over almost anything. Give me a plot that clicks shut like a box in the final chapter or an image that evolves into something that feels both unforeseeable and yet inevitable and I am your reader for life. Here are a few books and writers that do that for me:
- Jo Ann Beard, The Boys of My Youth. Her essay, “The Fourth State of Matter,” takes my breath away every time I read it.
- Ann Patchett. Any of her books, really, but Bel Canto was the first one I read and loved.
- Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon – I remember gasping in surprise at the end of this book
- A. E. Stallings, This Afterlife
- Anne Carson, Nox
- Anything at all by Ted Kooser
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The poems in Abide were written over the course of ten years, and throughout that time I kept returning to writers who were thinking about loss and time. I’m mentioning specific books here, but in all three cases I’ve read everything these poets have written:
- Mark Doty, From Fire to Fire. I think I became a poet because of Mark Doty—because of the way he takes the small things that catch his attention and looks at them closely, until they give up their meaning. Also, my first poetry teacher told me, “If Mark Doty can write about his dogs, so can you!” and that permission has resulted in multiple dog-related poems in Abide.
- Marie Howe, What the Living Do. I adore all of Marie Howe’s poetry, but this was my introduction to her, and it gave me permission to see how the specifics of my own loss and my ordinary life could be poetry as well.
- Larry Levis, The Widening Spell of the Leaves. Every poet I know loves Levis. The way he handles time–in almost every poem he wrote–is inimitable and mind-blowing and always an inspiration to me.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I used to be a terrible snob about my reading habits: in my early twenties someone in a job interview asked me what my guilty-pleasure reading was, and all I could come up with was Thomas Hardy. As I get older I care less about impressing anyone with my exquisite taste and more about enjoying myself as much as possible. My tastes are pretty catholic: my TBR pile includes sci-fi recommended by my co-workers in tech, novels and nonfiction by people I know and love (such a joy!), and always at least one self-help book. My poetry stack jumps off the nightstand and continues onto the floor. Like most writers, I am powerless in a bookstore, so this is just a sampling:
- Pilgrims, by Devin Kelly
- Rare Good: Essays on Art, Autism, and Astonishment, by Steve Edwards
- A Parade of Horribles, by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #8)
- The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life, by James Martin, SJ
- Poetry:
- I Do Know Some Things, by Richard Siken
- Sugar, by Andrea Cohen
- Exit Opera, by Kim Addonizio
- Excellent Wildlife Photos, by Clay Ventre
- Swirl & Vortex, by Larry Levis
- Selected Poems, by Mary Ruefle