{"product_id":"letters-to-forget-isbn-9780593538012","title":"Letters to Forget","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe debut of Kelly Caldwell, written from within the darkness of bipolar illness and the longing to claim her womanhood\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“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.”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBoth 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 \u003ci\u003eby Letters to Forget\u003c\/i\u003e because within it is great pain, loneliness, loss, and \u003ci\u003eordinary\u003c\/i\u003e madness. Yet Kelly Caldwell has composed with a lyrical precision and syntactical range that approach transcendence. I return to the image of \u003ci\u003eGentle flesh carrying in the great sleep a storm\u003c\/i\u003e. It comforts as it haunts. Here is a poetry that holds the hushed now in which Kelly \u003ci\u003elive[s] in time’s pause between [her] voice\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003ci\u003eAs one body stumbles out of another\u003c\/i\u003e: this is her \u003ci\u003enoun’s new nearness\u003c\/i\u003e. In the final section she writes, \u003ci\u003eMemory can collapse time to such an extent that something may thus live and die almost simultaneously\u003c\/i\u003e. 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. \u003ci\u003eToward a lathed new life\u003c\/i\u003e. Turn. Be with this book and be blessed.” —TC Tolbert, author of \u003ci\u003eGephyromania\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Quiet Practices\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Across a mix of epistolary prose-poems, denser and periodized lyrics, and narrative, Kelly Caldwell’s \u003ci\u003eLetters to Forget\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eWe made an offer on the house now what\u003c\/i\u003e, she writes before concluding, \u003ci\u003eDebt. Is its own reward.\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003ci\u003e Part of the law\u003c\/i\u003e, g-d tells the speaker, \u003ci\u003eis \u003c\/i\u003e\/ \u003ci\u003ethe side-eye between \u003c\/i\u003e\/ \u003ci\u003eForgiving and forgetting\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003ci\u003eLetters to Forget\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eAlso the distance of the fields\u003c\/i\u003e \/\/ \u003ci\u003eAlso the proximity of the sunlight.\u003c\/i\u003e” —Jos Charles, author of \u003ci\u003ea Year \u0026amp; other poems\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eWe Are Mermaids\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eA 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 \u003ci\u003eDenver Quarterly, Entropy, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, Seneca Review, The Rumpus,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eVICE.\u003c\/i\u003e She was founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of \u003ci\u003eThe Spectacle\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303171870949,"sku":"NP9780593538012","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593538012.jpg?v=1767731378","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/letters-to-forget-isbn-9780593538012","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}