Letters to Forget: Poems (Cass Donish and Kelly Caldwell Books #2)

By: Kelly Caldwell

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Synopsis: 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?