Winner of the 2025 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize
Abide
Poems about mortality, caregiving, love,
and the stubborn persistence of joy.
Coming September 1st from Ashland Poetry Press
Praise for Abide
Abide is a book attentive to the world and the movement of thought, with a keen awareness of mortality. Despite suffering and loss, Landon finds meaning and hope, and even joy, in the daily ways we can connect to and care for each other…. It’s no easy task to acknowledge the forces against that stance, yet time and again it happens in this compassionate collection.
— Kim Addonizio
How can you not love a debut collection built from five decades of carefully cached observations, sharp humor, and hard won wisdom? As much a book of loss, as a book of grief, as a book of navigating, renewing, and appreciating long love, Abide is a record of and a guide for a life well-lived, one that fully acknowledges mortality while still insisting on joy.
— Jessica Jacobs
Gravitas, wisdom, song and strong skill. If you want the real deal, you’ve come to the right place. Abide may be K. T. Landon’s first full-length collection but it is by no means her first rodeo. She is, and has been for a while now, one of my favorite poets… And I am overjoyed that you, Reader, hold in your hands, finally, an opportunity to catch up!
— John Murillo
READINGS & CONversations
Join me for readings, conversations, and workshops around Abide.
A Few Poems
Poems from Abide.
What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine
….My neighbor is a good man,
a minor god who has brought forth a paradise
for chickens. And I know those chickens, clucking
contentedly in their self-important obliviousness,
are too foolish to be a metaphor for hope
(though isn’t hope always foolish?) but in this poem
the chickens stand for joy—for feed scattered
with a free hand and fresh water in the trough…
To My Husband, to Make Much
of Time
Is the poem about death again?
you ask and of course it’s about death,
they’re all about death,
every poem ever written—ever—is about
death. Lyrics? Death. Love poems? Death.
Ballads, odes, epics? Death! I guarantee you
that the man from Nantucket is deeply concerned
about his own mortality…
The Past, Never Dead
(An Andalusian Dog)
…and you are fifty and your sister is dead,
and you are nineteen and bawling in French 103,
and you are five and there are no lobsters
and your sister is right there
beside you in the room you share,
whispering to you in the dark.