The Ultimate Bone

I. Plague Art

The dominant artistic modes of the current age can be roughly organized into what might be called ague art and plague art. The former offers a clear moral code as a tonic for the fevers that bedevil us. It documents the social ills and inequalities that waste us, individually and collectively, to the bone. It’s fundamentally diagnostic and often prescriptive. Ague art aims its rhetorical cannons at a clear perpetrator, or it comforts a victim. It frequently mobilizes nostalgia. It speaks of solace for the elect. It believes in art’s autonomy and its ability to speak with authority from outside the unjust systems that wreck us.

Plague art offers no such prescriptions. Apocalyptic by nature, plague art metabolizes mass death and planetary extinction yet offers documents of survival, real or imaginary. It is everywhere swampier than ague art because the agents of harm cannot be directly addressed, much less surmounted, by any one individual. It is the unruly domain of the danse macabre, the memento mori, the vanitas of shock and trauma that will not resolve. It memorializes, resists, and fantasizes escape. It cannot extricate itself from injurious systems, or from death itself. Actual repair is unimaginable because the claim of death is that absolute, an event horizon delineating a black hole.

Much of the imagery popularly associated with plague art derives from medieval depictions of the Black Plague, during which art became littered with skeletons. A notable example, the 15th-century fresco The Triumph of Death, by Giacomo Borlone de Burchis, pictures Death as an ecstatic skeleton queen accompanied by two skeleton henchmen who fire mercilessly on the supplicants below. A more recent literary example of plague art is Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, written as his wife was dying of tuberculosis—the disease had already killed many of Poe’s relatives, including his mother. In Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, Death, personified, plays chess with the protagonist and leads people in a danse macabre to their graves. In living memory, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the arresting work of artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Rosa von Praunheim as they responded to the AIDS crisis constitute a real-time record of mass death.

Perhaps the most infamous (and expensive) memento mori of the present age, though, is Damien Hirst’s 2007 sculpture For the Love of God. This life-size platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull is covered with 8,601 diamonds and is inset with the skull’s original weathered teeth. Many critics decried the piece as “blingy” and “tasteless,” but art historian Rudi Fuchs interprets it otherwise: "It proclaims victory over decay. At the same time it represents death as something infinitely more relentless.”

In her new collection Skeletons (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), Deborah Landau simultaneously signals these two conceits—victory over decay and the ultimate victory of decay. The dropped jaw of any skull (not just Hirst’s) gives it a zany, laughing air that unsettles the living. The zaniness of Skeletons is less immediately legible. The literary critic Sianne Ngai diagnoses “the zany” as an aesthetic category in which the line between labor and play is confused. Her primary example is Lucille Ball, who, in I Love Lucy, transforms from ballerina to bellhop to vaudeville comedian to saleswoman in “an undifferentiated, chaotic swirl,” leaving the audience uncertain as to whether they should respond with humor or concern. “What is eating the zany?” Ngai asks. “Why is she so desperate and stressed out?”

In poetry, Frank O’Hara, one of Landau’s touchstones, perhaps most acutely embodies the zany. His poems—such as “The Day Lady Died” and “Personal Poem”—are ceaseless hives of activity and megawatt jouissance. Likewise, one of the most intriguing things about Skeletons, a book that contains a memento mori on nearly every page, is the sheer brio and exhilaration of the speaker—her tendency “to toggle between gloomy and elate.” What’s eating the speaker in Skeletons, not unlike what’s eating O’Hara, is a relentless sense of her own mortality, which manifests as an active, disruptive compulsion:

… the true mouth in sweetest opposition to the endless
endlessness into which (we disappear) begs the tongue to differ, says
this is raspberry, this cocoa, this the tender flesh
of peach, says a body I am and right now it’s fine with me, it’s copacetic.
Nothing we’ll be nothing, nothing forever?

The keening that concludes this dense swarm of a poem completely upends it. The “true mouth” exists only as an imaginary site of resistance. Here, the parentheses work in reverse, making “(we disappear)” visually louder than everything that surrounds it. If Landau is consumed by a prevailing sense of her own mortality, she is also consumed by the ways in which the line between work and play almost invariably blurs for women, particularly when it comes to sex and particularly as they age. But what’s most striking about Skeletons is how Landau mobilizes the female libido as a site of resistance to her own mortality.

II. “Hello emptiness”: Memento Mori and the Uses of Pleasure

Skeletons is a slender volume that consists primarily of eight-line acrostic poems, each of which spells—and is titled—“Skeleton.” It's an elegant and simple framework, the way the word Skeleton nails down the left margin of nearly every page. By titling all of these acrostic poems the same way, Landau creates an ossuary in miniature: two skeletons per page, with each brief poem studded with death references. The speaker explains:

…I’ve got a
knack for it I’m morbid, make the worst of any season
exclamation point                yet levity’s a liquor of sorts,
lowers us through life toward the terminus soon
extinguished

A skeleton, by definition, is both the dried-up remains of a body and its opposite: the framework that supports a living body, anchoring muscles and protecting organs. “Skeleton, some wonder if you are practical / keening as you do throughout this city / ensconced in flesh, a tailored suit for bones.” Death and life are thus neatly fused in the figure of the skeleton, and this forms the crucible from which the speaker addresses readers: “… Dwelling in bones I go straight / through life, a sublime abundance—cherries, dog’s breath, the sun, then / (ouch) & all of us snuffed out.” Throughout this collection, Landau’s stereoscopic vision splits: one eye stares into the void; the other stays trained on the luxuries that embodiment allows and mortality quickens. This double sense of life-in-death manifests in nearly every poem:

Sorry not sorry, said death. He wasn’t fucking around, incessant
klepto. Meanwhile, the internets wouldn’t shut up about perfection,
elegance, the feminine ideal [...] It was hard not to puff up while
lactating. It took heft to host the parasite. Pregnancy brought a swampy
edema. Bye-bye, ankles. Nice knowing you, feet. Intermittent fasting?
Time to give it a rest.           We shrink eventual to the ultimate bone,
obits keening, farewell, flesh! So wax zaftig, carb while you can, willy-
nilly you’ll get there, we’ll get there together, we’re already on our way.

These poems are conversational memento mori, sprinkled with chatty, O’Haraesque bursts right out the gate: “Sorry not sorry, said death.” The voice is delightfully propulsive—and compulsive—as it works against the potential monolith of the acrostic form. The surprising line breaks and enjambment teeter asymmetrically to exhilarating effect, as in the very first line. It appears to be a complete thought, with incessant modifying death, until we run smack into the shock of the enjambed klepto. Likewise, the jolt of lactating and the delightfully off-kilter break of willy- / nilly.

If O’Hara is a touchstone, so is the carpe diem gusto of Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” Landau’s beef with death frequently merges with Herrick’s oft-quoted exhortation to pleasure to create lines of startling dissonance: “We shrink eventual to the ultimate bone, / obits keening, farewell, flesh! So wax zaftig, carb while you can. …” Or, elsewhere in Skeletons, “let’s ravel together while we still have limbs / in this room made warm by our own resources. / Our appetites don’t know from time’s-up, hurry. …” More often than not, though, life in lockdown complicates these appeals as the speaker skews ragged, trying to juggle multiple roles:

Mommy in midlife is she nonperishable? Of course not.
Let’s play full speed ahead with the bright souvenirs of this day.
Wasn’t I a hapless one. Fundamentally mental.
Watching days go by this life not knowing how to do it.

Here, the hortatory zest of the second line is squeezed from beneath the weight of “midlife” parenthood. That the speaker refers to herself in third person—although common for parents of young children—is perhaps the most telling signifier of the exiled, beleaguered I. We feel the speaker’s effort “to generate a little life fizz / energy-burst.” “Let’s play” enjoins—the child? the husband? readers?—to do something odd. If “full speed ahead” leans into a sense of futurity, of possibility, then the “souvenirs” mark the day as having already passed, as somehow already concluded even as it’s unfurling.

The subsequent two lines leap out of time, as if looking back on the domestic scene from a great distance. The pronouncement “Wasn’t I a hapless one. Fundamentally mental” sounds like half self-censure, half screwball comedy. This tonal hybridity, what one might call zaniness, is one of Landau’s sharpest tools as is her penchant for collaging sentence fragments. The impulse toward collage appears even within an individual line: “Watching days go by this life not knowing how to do it.” “This life” feels pasted into the middle of an otherwise fairly straightforward sentiment, collaged over where readers expect the word and. Add to this the indeterminacy of the pronoun it, and this seemingly colloquial line, missing punctuation, full of hiccups, veers away from normative sense-making. The jump cut, the suture, the obliteration of punctuation within a line—these things simultaneously destabilize and shore up the line with lightning speed. Jump cuts are a signature of Landau’s style in Skeletons as her deft bricolage captures the messiness of a restless mind:

… forever fidgeting
even through your own funeral, incessant restless in the box.
Temperamentally unfit for death, are you? It can’t be
outwit. Everyone who’s lived has died so far, you’d say, ever
nimble. That’s it! You’re here to stay.

These lines are delivered like a mini cabaret sketch with a ba-da-bing ending. It’s unclear whether they represent external dialogue or are more akin to a shadow theater in which, as with John Berryman’s Henry and Mr. Bones, the I and you forever collapse into each other, manifestations of an internal dialectic. In other instances, a dialogue with a bony shadow self comes into clearer focus, the speaker barking at herself: “Natter on, nitwit. I’ve had about enough of you.”

III. Null Ciphers / Wards Against Death

The acrostic form is technically classified as a null cipher, a secret code that contains “nulls,” nonsignificant letters in which a hidden message is buried. If “Skeleton” (or death) is the (not-so-) secret message “hidden” in every poem, it is also the scaffolding from which the book grows—death generating art. “The universe is a cipher…,” writes Octavio Paz, “the poem is the universe’s double. … To write a poem is to decipher the universe only to create a new cipher.” Substitute death for universe and you nearly apprehend the work these small poems do. Charms cast against the void, they are death’s double:

… You are transitory,
the world laughed.   Oh yeah, we laughed back. So what?       
Ovulating, while it lasted, was a blast, mainlining that Eros—
nectar, nabbed.        (As if!)          Any way outta this bag of bones?

The insouciance of youth as a ward against death is a recurring talisman in Skeletons: “We were mad for the body in its meant-for-pleasure finery, lips a-cherry, / nails glossed wine, libido an overdrive meant to keep us here a long time.” Seen with greater clarity, it’s the female libido that’s the ward. “Ovulating” and “mainlining that Eros,” being “mad for the body”—these are the things that allow the speaker and her cohort to laugh in the face of death. “We were / excessive,” the speaker reveals in a poem that opens with the line “Strutting avec Cyndi Lauper, a flourish.” Throughout the collection, such reminiscences are contrasted with the present-day speaker:

…knee-deep in existential gloom,
except when the fog smokes the bridges like this—
like, instead of being afraid, we might juice ourselves up,
eh, like, might get kissed again?

The ethereal—smokes—rubs against the libidinal—juice ourselves up—in a strikingly sensual display, but what really attunes us to the voice are its most minute turns: the halting repetition of like, the sly eh, the upward lilt as the unexpected question mark lands. Even more than the overt content, these moments open a tiny door to hope, to the revivification of a speaker who feels too often—mid-pandemic, mid-life—like a corpse.

The acrostic “Skeleton” poems are periodically interrupted by solitary, non-acrostic poems titled “Flesh,” which initially appear to be a counterpoint. “Pleasure is so useful when it comes,” the speaker says in the first “Flesh” poem. “Pleasure’s the perfect swerve. It wins you back.” Despite the ennui and paralysis of lockdown, despite the perils of aging, which have long been the equivalent of a social death sentence for women, sexual appetite persists:

only flesh is elevating it clasps
a prick can be key    
how it brings along
exquisite its red life animal press

The speaker is highly attuned to the randomness of sex: “Sex came from nowhere an illogic / kind of fracture”—a description that could just as easily fit death. The libidinal drive is marvelously inventive—“It was on a lark it was for the moment we tried each thing”—and relentless: “ And again our clothes are on the floor.” Most of the “Flesh” poems address or refer to the speaker’s husband as a coconspirator: “… say yes to hot earthling / nirvana—the incarnate husband, mortalflesh here&now.” Or elsewhere, in a Steinian domestic surrealism: “Kissing his cheek. Swallowing water. An orgasm. / Blooms on the nightstand.”

Indeed, one pleasure of Skeletons is watching Landau switch modes of representation to describe sex. There are bursts of mischievous, Chelsey Minnis-like detail: “Chocolate on the tongue. Vodka. Velvet. Voilà. / A zipper slinking in its silver, its long slide down.” There are also passages in which sex is painted more abstractly: “Every bliss is built this way, a hollow thing, / with many entrances, with blood pumping / a live tongue and limber torso, a fine sweat rising in.” Regardless of the mode of representation, female sexual appetite is Skeleton’s central counterweight to death:

Hello emptiness that is coming it will engulf
and then, a freighted woman I’ll fall back into my hole,
goodbye.        My body will never be satisfied.
But here in the preheadache seasonal glitter,
first burst of summer, still the thrill of it, the heat—

It seems a vaudeville act: a “freighted woman” breezily greeting the void and falling back into a hole, chirping “goodbye.” “My body will never be satisfied” initially seems to indicate the speaker will die burdened, but the lines that follow recast this line in terms of sexual satisfaction. “Glitter,” “burst,” “thrill”—all transitory and all the more arousing to the speaker because of it. In a funny, oblique way, the speaker also casts shade on death: death doesn’t satisfy her, sex—at least fleetingly—does. If death is a one-time event, sex is not only an event but a repeat engagement.

This is not to say Landau has an overly rosy or solipsistic view of eroticism and intimacy. In one “Skeleton” poem about painful “Sexing [while] sunburned,” she writes “Eros, Thanatos, we maxed out for years. Who’s hating on us now? / Touché. The beach was your idea. Monogamy has its share of / occupational hazards. …” Deep into lockdown, she dreams of partners other than her husband. “Studmuffin stuntman spicing up my winter quarantine / keep out of my dreams please with your / ersatz bedside manner.” And elsewhere the libido wilts, curls up in a corner. “Yeah, one minute she’s / ogling men on the metro like some grody monsieur, the next wanting to die.”

Landau also never lets readers forget that she’s writing in and through a pandemic: “Stolen year but we’re still here. Meditation fails, / kabbalah perplexes, a gloom fouls the stacked weeks— / emojis can’t put a dent in it.” In the guts of the book, the speaker wrestles with a murderous boredom, and Plath’s “viciousness in the kitchen” gets reworked as “Soporifics fail tonight nerves scuttling in the / kitchen god-knows-what skulking round in its nasty restless / exoskeleton.”

IV. “Are We Done with Life?”

In lockdown, the world lost its shape and orientation became impossible. This was not exactly news for the speaker, a Gen Xer for whom the world lost its shape some time ago: “… Some things stayed the same, like /our nostalgia, like insomnia. Faraway places became more like this place. / Nights were felt as a stream of departures in the hive.” The speaker, under pressure to adapt to a vanishing world, clings to life, even if only as a zany caricature:

Eager to stay, I take the kale and kombucha
toting a calamitous hairdo and wrecked face as
onward we sublimate (bones, bones, bones)
never again veiled in skin.

Yet her appetites save her from self-parody and keep her enfleshed. “Are we done with life? I am still so into it. / I like to drink and read and use my mouth,” the speaker says late in the book, twinkling with a fulgent hunger.

Skeletons ends with “Ecstasies,” a five-part poem that seems to indicate a sea change, although that is not the case. Addressed to the speaker’s husband, it’s more of a coda. All the preoccupations of the book overlap to the extent that one cannot feel them as distinct modes. This is not a weakness but testament to an omnivorous intelligence that refuses to disavow her experience of mortality and sexual appetite as being irretrievably tangled.

There’s an attempt to usher in a grand finality at the end of Skeletons, a push toward a kind of Whitmanian ecstasy: “& what was this velvet for? spring didn’t know— // flags of the grave? well also a jubilance not just a bawling.”But happily, the speaker keeps interrupting herself with ghoulish pronouncements: “Intricate past numb present and the future that narrows / all of us into a shovel of dirt.” And heartbreaking questions, as in one of the final “Flesh” poems: “Will we ever run out of days? Who dares to count. / To say there are maybe thirty more Christmases, / if we’re lucky, thirty more Julys.”But what Landau does offer, if not a reconciliation with death, is perhaps something just as useful and perhaps more authentic, a temporary reprieve, an intimate solace:

Look, these bones are made for us
and the room is mild, and the catastrophe
though nearer is still not.