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“Landfill is a searing poetry collection in which André Le Mont Wilson excavates a formative summer working at a city sanitation yard—a landscape of garbage trucks, locker-room porn, and predatory supervision that shadowed the lives of vulnerable boys long before his own. Written in interlocking quaterns, the poems spiral through grooming, silence, and survival, asking whose bodies get discarded and whose stories go untold.” —Frank Spinelli, MD, author of The Shame Compass and Pee-Shy
“In Landfill, André Le Mont Wilson’s stunning debut chapbook, the literal becomes metaphor in a junkyard full of secrets. A collection of linked poems reveals the story of a young Black boy grappling with his sexuality in the grip of a predatory older man. In lyrical, epistolary quatrains, anchored by a resonant repeating line, the speaker confronts his abuser with visceral precision, tender vulnerability, and unflinching bravery. These poems of survival render the unspeakable, holding truth as an antidote to silence.” —Hollie Hardy, author of Lions Like Us and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems
“In Landfill, André Le Mont Wilson takes us on a haunting, searing journey into a long-hidden adolescent past. Refusing victimhood yet acknowledging layers upon layers of pain, we behold a gifted author in the courageous process of reclaiming and producing his own singular voice, speaking back with nuance, precision, and fearless honesty to a shadowy abusive figure. Guided by Wilson’s poetry, we are put in mind of Dante’s Inferno: we descend into the depths, yet at each moment we become increasingly aware of the miraculous trajectory of a soul journeying towards the light. Landfill is a remarkable gift of language and remembrance, an excavation of a buried life, at once a living memorial to those who never emerged and a startling testament to the power of words to heal us all.” —Mark Auslander, author of The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family
“Survivor stories are so important, essential to both poet and reader. André Le Mont Wilson, this Cinderfella, is alive but ‘survived scarred.’ With halting honesty and with language that takes your breath away, Landfill breaks your heart wide open. Let these lines that continually reinvent themselves show all your senses the height of this poet’s awareness—awareness of pain, of life, of what’s at stake living through a landfill.” —Donna Jenson, Founder of Time To Tell