Witty and glam, Skeletons is a prismatic collection which shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humour and intimacy.

'Deborah Landau's poems make me feel alive. They are the city, the body, the evening drink transformed into pure essence. If you want to be returned to your senses and remember the pleasures of the world, this book is for you' Alex Dimitrov

'Landau's earthy, angsty poems - about sex and mortality and cosmic despair - are insistently quotable, and more fun than they have any right to be. One opens with a line Emily Dickinson might have written, had she been on Twitter: "Sorry not sorry, said death' New York Times Book Review

'By turns melancholy and exuberant, but always fuelled by formal and sonic play, this collection - structured around a sequence of "Skeleton" acrostics, punctuated by a series of "Flesh" interludes - measures the fact of mortality against the pleasures and possibilities of being alive' New Yorker (Best Books of 2023)

'In her shining fifth collection, Landau chooses the somewhat unexpected acrostic form as a container for her punchy riffs on modern life . . . A resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality' Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)


'An unnerving, strangely erotic reminder of what the pandemic felt like . . . a perfect reflection of those months of enforced intimacy amid the threat of death' Washington Post