Letters to forget : poems /
With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the final poems of Kelly Caldwell-many addressed to Cass Donish, her partner in the years before her suicide at thirty-one, swim through a complex matrix of transformations, including mental illness, divorce, gender transition and self-discovery. But...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Alfred A. Knopf,
[2024].
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the final poems of Kelly Caldwell-many addressed to Cass Donish, her partner in the years before her suicide at thirty-one, swim through a complex matrix of transformations, including 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 refused to affirm her identity. In a 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 us from beyond: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change? |
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| Item Description: | "A Borzoi book"--Title page verso. |
| Physical Description: | vii, 92 pages ; 22 cm. |
| ISBN: | 9780593538012 0593538013 9781524712501 1524712507 |