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Poems
by Kelly Caldwell
The debut of Kelly Caldwell, written from within the darkness of bipolar illness and the longing to claim her womanhood.
"There can be no history of my body. My forgetfulness is in earnest. I check for it like for keys in a pocket. I've remained a girl all my life."
With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the poems of Kelly Caldwell—many addressed to the poet Cass Donish, her partner in the years before Caldwell's suicide at age thirty-one—swim through a complex matrix of transformations: mental illness, divorce, gender transition, and self-discovery. But they wrestle, too, with the poet's painful relationships with her family of Christian missionaries, who never affirmed her identity. In the sequence of "dear c." poems scattered throughout these pages, Caldwell writes letters to her lover from an out-of-state residential hospital where she is receiving treatment for suicidal depression and mania. In a long poem titled "Self-Portrait as Job," she offers us her lucid gaze and her queer take on the biblical figure—an understated yet powerful testament to her own suffering in a society whose structures may not contain her.
Both striking and elusive, both raw and learned, with a delicacy of syntax that challenges us to interrogate becoming itself, Kelly Caldwell asks: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?
"It is almost impossible to say I feel blessed by Letters to Forget because within it is great pain, loneliness, loss, and ordinary madness. Yet Kelly Caldwell has composed with a lyrical precision and syntactical range that approach transcendence...Lionhearted, brilliant, and tender, as she is made new, so are we. Toward a lathed new life. Turn. Be with this book and be blessed." —TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices
"These prose poems, sliced sentences, scary epistolary creations and archetypal tours reach from literal hospitals to the cosmic spaces of troubled queer hearts, from extremes of emotion to other extremes, white-hot all the while, like slices of fallen stars, 'like phosphor along the seam of a rock,' erotic, enticing, terrified, ready to share...Caldwell has left us a book written in urgent images, in the language of myth, but also in 'medical electricity' that rouses 'the Rabbit/ Of Hope,' where 'life's as frayed as an old silver blanket to wrap the beings of fiction in.' We are those beings. This book is that blanket. It glows." —Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids
This information about Letters to Forget 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.
A trans poet, writer, and visual artist, Kelly Caldwell was the winner of the Norma Lowry Memorial Prize and the Cornelison English Prize from Washington University in St. Louis, an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and the 2019 Greg Grummer Prize. Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, and VICE. She was founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of The Spectacle. Caldwell died in March 2020. At the time, she was living in Columbia, Missouri, with her partner, the writer Cass Donish. She was posthumously awarded an honorary PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis.
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