-Finalist in the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Poetry
Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience—her own—Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging to the rural landscape—despite the inheritance of displacement and removal from a country of origin—Landlock X tries to solve for all of the (adoptee’s) variables and knows it is an impossible task that the "I", "you", and "we" of the poems only approximate.
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From "The Black Cows in the Foreground"
it is unknown
where the bones
of your mother
turned to fragments
none in the painting
of the black cows
so where to grieve
her body
no parcel of land
to plant sorrow
in furrowed rows
the black cows graze