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Poems
by Cass Donish
Written in the devastating aftermath of a partner's suicide, this unprecedented collection is a restorative memorial act, an exploration of queer time, and a powerful expression of nonbinary and trans love in the wake of traumatic loss.
"suddenly a brilliant red-tailed star / flew across the sky, a sun reversing time, / I crossed one world to another / I stood with her in the other world"
In Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of "obliteration," widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss.
With searing vulnerability and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief. "Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face," they write, unearthing the wild and shifting scale of mourning. Donish affirms the beauty of their lover's trans becoming, recalling when they "sounded out / your new potential names / until we found those syllables / that tasted, you said, like honey." In the sequence "Kelly in Violet," the centerpiece of this collection, the shattering experience emerges in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose words appear in ghostly traces.
Your Dazzling Death ritualizes the work of grief and subverts linear time, asserting that the future will forever be informed by a monumental love that is still alive, not only in the past, but in an imagined space of timelessness where love and grief are inevitably intertwined.
"A real voice is a true challenge. Such a voice emanates from a speaker with doubts, desires, and convictions, and is made real not by circumstance but by its mind devising—and revising—a path from doubt to conviction, through desire, and back again. Grieving the beloved and galvanized by 'the question of surviving' that grief, Your Dazzling Death takes us on this path with a speaker who discovers that becoming real foremost to oneself is a radical task. Propulsive music, precise imagery, the transfiguration of life into timeless wisdom: these poems bring us to a powerful mind that tells us, and will remind us, that fragments 'fell together only // in how things fell apart,' and that by living and testing our will to live, we are 'somehow, already, / in [our] next life.' Cass Donish is a real voice. Theirs is true, and they will challenge." —Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling
"Your Dazzling Death is a moving and powerful elegy, while also being mysterious and perhaps mystical in its invocations of our body's place in the natural world. But this is not an elegy with consolation. It's one that bravely and vulnerably pushes us into the depths and stakes of the unimaginable. With clarity and messiness, tenderness and rage, Cass Donish makes unforgettable art out of the impossible intertanglings of grief, desire, bewilderment, and all the love that survives." —Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Performance of Becoming Human
"An elegy is a conversation that never ends. As if death didn't exist. As if speech isn't sometimes silence. As if poetry isn't often the little that's left. These poems—brilliant, devastating—are evidence that a woman was once alive, and loved, and that that, the all of it, is now equally over and not over: a complicated truth that gives rise to both excruciating pain and mitigating consolation." —Mary Jo Bang, author of A Film in Which I Play Everyone and Elegy
This information about Your Dazzling Death was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Queer poet and writer Cass Donish was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. They are the author of the poetry collections Beautyberry and The Year of the Femme, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, as well as the nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine. Their work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, VICE, and elsewhere. Donish received an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon, an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. They live in Columbia, Missouri.
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