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.
