Splashed Things - by Leigh Lucas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"'I sing so he can cry, ' writes Leigh Lucas in Splashed Things, her lucid portrait of a young woman devastated by great and unexpected loss. Into these deftly built and deeply moving poems, Lucas alchemizes the memory of grief and the grief of memory, with restraint, irreverence, and a devotion so total that I can only understand it as love. I don't know a single person who could read this book with an open heart and mind and not be made more human." --Charif Shanahan, Whiting Award-winning author of Trace Evidence: Poems

"'A child's hand in a fat grip on a fat crayon, puncturing crêpe paper' is how our speaker describes their poems. But our speaker is cataclysmically clever, and while these poems tolerate no fragile surface, their majesty far exceeds this devastating premise, allowing us into the private sacrifices a woman makes to protect the life that follows the death of the beloved. Never alone, and certainly never entirely defeated, Leigh Lucas renders the defiance, doubt, and ambition required to go on in grief with tenderheartedness and venom, humor hewn from absurdity and a sharpness of mind. Lucas reaches for complete transformation, grasping her new life with all that poetry empowers, and is most impressively real when everything fails. 'The world will be unsettled, ' our poet observes. 'I will unsettle them.'" --Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

"Leigh Lucas transmits the lasting shockwaves of grief: the anger and bitterness, blame and shame, its landsickness, and the empty shapes into which we accumulate the things left, inside the private rooms we build around the negative space grief leaves in our lives. The memories called up again and again, involuntary, changing shape each time, words once spoken replaced with new words, drawing us both closer and farther away from who and what we miss. These poems are falling apart for love, are devastatingly honest, naked, bleeding, and brutally self-searching. I'll think about them forever." --Sarah Gerard, author of Carrie Carolyn Coco

About the Author

Leigh Lucas is the author of Splashed Things, winner of the A. Poulin Jr Poetry Prize (Boa Editions, 2026), and Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024), selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. The recipient of residencies from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, her writing can be found in Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Adroit, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Levis reading prize from VCU. Her first full-length collection, American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry and her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack's best-selling featured publications. The Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, she teaches at NYU and elsewhere.