Letters to Forget

“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

“Across a mix of epistolary prose-poems, denser and periodized lyrics, and narrative, Kelly Caldwell’s Letters to Forget attends to what affect conditions and enables—alienation, suffering, debt—but too the tenderness of small, small things: exchanges between loves, the intimacies of animals, French philosophy, an attempted purchase of a home. We made an offer on the house now what, she writes before concluding, Debt. Is its own reward. Such a verse of both/and, a repetition that reveals two logics at once, is one among many qualities of Caldwell’s work—concision, elegant repetitions, reparative imagining in defeat. In an extended narrative, ‘Self-Portrait as Job,’ she reimagines the biblical narrative across a life of queerness and hospitalization, the unlawfulness revealed across each. Part of the law, g-d tells the speaker, is / the side-eye between / Forgiving and forgetting. Letters to Forget reveals not just a poet who could’ve been, but a fully-formed poet among and with us. I am the last woman, she tells us, In the world. Yet, she writes of the house, other homes are possible. May the book you hold be both the last and possible, both. Also the distance of the fields // Also the proximity of the sunlight.” —Jos Charles, author of a Year & other poems

“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. ‘Out of a question comes a pinhole camera. Out of a question comes a posthumous sun.’ This book’s arranger, creator, conjurer sees herself in the rural Midwest and in the Bible’s Job, forever communicating with friends, or false friends, who cannot fully take her in, asking ‘who can survive without a listener?’ She ‘glues the grass to her fuzzy dress,’ as if the chlorophyll cells became shattered panes; she reaches out ‘until the scar arrives,’ in a series of missives where ‘no one promises light or tomorrow,’ though this book will be around tomorrow, tomorrow, the years after that, alongside other poems and songs of heart-crushing archetypes: think H.D. and Sappho, Yona Wallach and Tori Amos.  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