Landlock X

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. ...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

"...in Landlock X, Sarah Audsley appears to have unlocked herselves and has shared those selves with us." --Tom Holmes in The Line Break, "...in Landlock X, Sarah Audsley appears to have unlocked herselves and has shared those selves with us." --Tom Holmes in The Line Break--Tom Holmes "The Line Break" (3/26/2023 12:00:00 AM), "Debut collections mark an irreversible moment in a poet's career, even while the previous years of labor and individually published poems testify to both resilience and talent." --Foreword Reviews--Matt Sutherland "Foreword Reviews", "'Nothing about hunger is passive, ' writes Sarah Audsley in this deft debut. That a poet as versed in detail and Image would choose to write within the pastoral tradition is not surprising. What surprises, however, is the way Audsley uses the pastoral as a vehicle to express many griefs: loss of a mother; loss of a country; loss of a culture; and even loss of a way of life. Despite an abundance of grief, Landlock X stands not as simple elegy but as a triumph of the self. This is a powerful collection." --C. Dale Young, author of Prometeo , "In Landlock X, Sarah Audsley makes of lyric an intimate journey toward an impossible beginning. Toward what it means to belong, to see (and be seen), to insist on connection--fraught and forged--in and through profound severance. I am so moved by how, where reclamation may not be an option, Audsley intervenes with imagination, intellectual and emotional breadth, and courage, to 'choose [her] own extent.' This work simultaneously indicts and consoles; it roams colors, oceans, flowers, the black holes of lineage and nation(s), and stands its ground. 'Almost drowning is touching creation, ' writes the poet, and I am compelled to reconsider the solidities I take for granted. To be alive." --Cynthia Dewi Oka, author of Fire Is Not a Country

SARAH AUDSLEY, a Korean American adoptee raised in rural Vermont, has received support from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre's Writing Studio, and a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. Her work appears in New England Review, The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a member of The Starlings Collective, she lives and works in Johnson, VT.