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.

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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