Abide

Winner of 2025 Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, selected by Kim Addonizio

K.T. Landon's Abide explores, without sentimentality or easy answers, how confronting mortality can open us to a more authentic joy--not by denying darkness, but by moving through it with humor, attention, and care. A sequence of poems titled "How to Go On" forms the book's spine, tracing the speaker's journey through profound losses, including her sister's death and her own cancer diagnosis. These contemplative pieces are balanced by poems such as "The Dead Go Bowling" and "What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine," which approach mortality with wry humor and root the speaker in the beauty of the everyday. Throughout the collection, explorations of marriage, faith, doubt, and memory intertwine with deeper meditations on what it means to continue living in the face of inevitable loss. While acknowledging grief's weight, these poems resist despair, discovering unexpected moments of transcendence in ordinary experience.

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. As she notes, The garden / is there: still, always. / And the sword. Whether mourning a family member, a dog, or the irreversible passage of time, these poems ask us to remember that whenever we can, we must, as Adam Zagajewski wrote, “try to praise the mutilated world.” It’s no easy task to acknowledge the forces against that stance, yet time and again it happens in this compassionate collection. I’m grateful to have this book to remind me.

—Kim Addonizio, 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Judge

We love what we love for as long as we can, writes K.T. Landon in Abide. And 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. …what we had was made of time. / That it could not last was always the point.

—Jessica Jacobs, 2025 Guggenheim Fellow

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, winner of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award