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.

I am not a New Yorker and will not praise this scaffolding-covered 

city we keep building forever and ever, amen.

Only occasionally do I still see him, like when someone on a Citi 

Bike swerves playfully or shakes a mass of curly hair. 

Walking the streets takes extreme effort, but even my bare-

minimum life requires it. 

When my phone dies, I am instantly and desperately lost.