Letters to Forget
Read by
Elijah Guerra
Release:
09/03/2024
Runtime:
1h 35m
Unabridged
Quantity:
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. I return to the image of Gentle flesh carrying in the great sleep a storm. It comforts as it haunts. Here is a poetry that holds the hushed now in which Kelly live[s] in time’s pause between [her] voice. As one body stumbles out of another: this is her noun’s new nearness. In the final section she writes, Memory can collapse time to such an extent that something may thus live and die almost simultaneously. And I realize this is the God we have in common: simultaneity. It is this God that Kelly speaks to, with, through, about, and sometimes against with stunning intimacy. 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
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?
“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?
Release:
2024-09-03
Runtime:
1h 35m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780593913116
Publisher:
Penguin Random House
Praise