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Out of a Land of Alkali & Chromate is about coming from, going out, and finding home. Growing up with an unpredictable and violent father, Landgraf found sanctuary with her grandparents and in books, food, and fairy tales. This is a story of yearning and seeking-both with some help from a prince and in the many other ways she found possible to make a
life of her own.
What I love most about this alchemical collection is how a bottle of gin/[transforms to] "a Museum of Mummies/(to) a Manufacturing Plant of Mistakes." In "Places that Made Me," readers experience a life unfolding, one woman's secrets finally shaken off. Out of a Land of Akali & Chromate is equal parts Martian and Hungarian and Memory. In this, Susan Landgraf's second full-length collection, she becomes most spectacularly herself in "pinpricks of light falling without sound; in the inner altar's great stones." Muriel Rukeyser once asked, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? Here is one gorgeous and hard-won answer.
-Susan Rich, author of Blue Atlas and Gallery of Postcards and Maps
There's a craftsperson at work in Susan Landgraf's Out of a Land of Alkali & Chromate. Her hybrid and inventive forms guide the reader from one unexpected place to another-physically, emotionally, and ecologically. Experiments with the long bones of language yield immersive sound, color, and taste, the experience of multisensory synesthesia. These richly detailed and heartbreaking poems were grown in a land where oysters teach us to pray and peaches to meditate; each surprise had me hungering for more.
-Gabriela Denise Frank, author of How to Not Become the Breaking
"In Susan Landgraf's Out of a Land of Alkali & Chromate, time arcs wide as we take a poetic journey by train from childhood trauma woven with wonder and ancestral legends to a new land of brave introspection and joy. Landgraf's matter-of-fact voice brings difficult subjects to the forefront in a way that is both charming and arresting. Untold fairy tale backstories come to light in this collection and expand the meanings of these engaging poems."
-Katy E. Ellis, author of Forty Bouts in the Wilderness
