Splashed Things is a raw, dark humored, and deeply moving collection that examines the chaotic terrain of grief following the suicide of an ex-boyfriend. With startling honesty and emotional precision, Lucas navigates the speaker’s journey through loss as a woman in her 20s, revealing how grief infiltrates every corner of her life—from the funeral home to a dead-end job, from the therapist’s office to the subways of New York City.

These lyrical poems search for traces of the lost 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.