Friday, April 24, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **"In my new life, I must learn everything again," begins _Splashed Things_, Leigh Lucas's dark humored and deeply moving debut that examines the chaotic terrain of grief following the suicide of a former boyfriend.** With startling honesty and emotional precision, these poems tell the story of a woman in her twenties navigating loss, from the funeral service and her dead-end job, to her therapist's office and the subways of New York City, revealing the way her beloved's death infiltrates every corner of her life. The speaker searches for traces of the departed in unlikely places--the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, the science of depression--while confronting the limitations of elegy and the futility of trying to contain sorrow in words. _Splashed Things_ is not a neat arc toward healing, but a testimony to the unwieldy shape of mourning and the persistence of love in its wake. Selected by Maya C. Popa as winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for its emotional courage, inventive language, and haunting beauty, Leigh Lucas's _Splashed Things_ marks the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry. **Leigh Lucas** is a writer in San Francisco. Her poetry collection _Splashed Things_ won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize from BOA Editions. Her chapbook _Landsickness_ (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. Leigh’s writing can be found in Academy of American Poets’ _Poem-a-Day_, _Adroit_, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson. **Brittany Ackerman** is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, HerStry, Write or Die, Lighthouse Writers, and Stanford. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee, and her work has been featured in _The Sun_, _MUTHA_, _Jewish Book Council_, _Lit Hub_, _The Los Angeles Review_, _No Tokens_, _Joyland_, and more. She is the author of the essay collection _The Perpetual Motion Machine_ (Red Hen Press) and the novel _The Brittanys_ (Vintage). She has a forthcoming novel with CLASH Books called _The Style of Your Life_. Her Substack is [_taking the stairs_.](https://brittanyackerman.substack.com/)