A Reading from the Book of Panic

Description

Justin Lacour

A Reading from the Book of Panic

ISBN: 978-1-956921-53-3 (pbk.)

(September 15, 2025) 

Justin Lacour’s A Reading from the Book of Panic begins in Eden and ends with a little epic.  Along the way, the poems contemplate anxiety, family, faith, addiction, and youth. There are elegies. There is a letter to Caitlin Clark. The primary focus of the book though is on love and marriage–whether looking at marriage through the lens of Genesis as a search for connection and intimacy or sending love letters that incorporate art, mythology, politics, B movies, and Keanu Reeves. The poems are by turns funny and tender, but always honest, as the couple tells each other myths, jokes, stories, and fairy tales until their marriage becomes an epic of its own.

It’s with good reason that the long opening poem “A Marriage” begins in an Eden, for Lacour’s calling cards here are a vulnerable interiority of run-on anxieties and of proving oneself after a fall from grace, seen throughout the probing interrogations in the prose poems that make up all but a choice few in this book. This is a collection not composed of young lovers but of those tested and scarred, for whom cultivation and upkeep is paramount and, yes, panic-inducing. Banishment is unthinkable but never far from mind. Throughout A Reading from the Book of Panic, what astounds is the resilience of devotion, of clinging to the shine of love even amid the loss of its starry-eyed luster, stubbornly and necessarily believing such a shine doesn’t just return but takes on a new brilliance. A meditation on the maintenance of love.

—Jacob Schepers, author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises

A man’s wife no longer wants roses. Maybe words, “but the right words.” And thus, A Reading from the Book of Panic is born. In these urgent and vulnerable poems, Justin Lacour reaches for his wife, Kate, again and again, and touches us, his readers, in “all the places/ you hurt without hurting them again.” Deeply feminist, the stakes here are high—“something to do with us staying together until we die.” As Lacour examines their “lives muddy but sacred,” we can only hope this Hail Mary landed safely and that the two are sitting on the porch, parting the pages and lifting a mocktail—both in and towards—the great pink light. 

—Nicole Callihan, author of SLIP & This Strange Garment

In A Reading from the Book of Panic women lose their shoes at parties, the serpent is always hungry, Italian girls are doing nitrous in the dorms; the AA meeting is always just down the street, Melville’s eyes are still blue; sweaters are full of holes, hands are clumsy on the back, nipples sore; and the two-headed animal that is a marriage, a creature of ache and lust, epic and weedy, opens up its mouth wide and swallows us.

—Ann Pedone, Editor-in-Chief of Antiphony: a journal & press