All Reviews

Published after poet Kelly Caldwell’s death in 2020, Letters to Forget is assured, electric and devastating. The collection comprises three sections: the first and third contain short poems written in one of two forms, either prose poems titled “[ dear c. ]” and addressed to the poet Cass Donish, Caldwell’s partner, or poems composed entirely of end-stopped lines, with titles like “[ house of rope ]” and “[ house of bare life ].” The middle section contains three long poems that engage with the story of Job through a lens of queerness, transness and mental illness. 

Within these constraints, Caldwell’s imagery and imagination soar. The epistolary “[ dear c. ]” poems were written during time Caldwell spent in a residential hospital receiving treatment for suicidal depression. There is deep sorrow in these poems, and a sense of restlessness—as if the lines are trying to break out of the page. Caldwell leaps from image to image, her mind and body constantly in motion. “Here are some awkward questions, and you can say what you’re thinking. How many bruises can I put on the scale before it tilts? How much does a marriage bed weigh? How to place this body on an actual body?” she writes in one. In another: “I wish starlings carpeted the floor of this rainy April morning instead of a beige spread.” 

There is a delicate playfulness in Letters to Forget, despite the severity of the subject matter. Caldwell writes with intellectual curiosity and emotional vulnerability, pondering the heaviness of memory, the power of claiming her own self and body, the balm of loving and being loved, and the often dark reality of living with bipolar disorder. Her inventive use of end-stops is nothing short of stunning; she divides sentences into new worlds with periods, creating a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from.

“What comfort does, we mimic, and we hope for marvelous clouds, and burned fog, and lovers’ spit,” Caldwell writes. It is heartbreaking that this debut will not be followed by other books, but the words that Caldwell has left us are not mimicry. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.

Danez Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Bluff, is a robust and inventive read, with poems ranging from essayistic to wordless. (One piece, “METRO” is a QR code that takes readers online to over two dozen pages that didn’t make it into the printed collection.) Bluff begins with a personal query: Has the poet betrayed their community by making art about Black pain? This is a topic the speaker returns to again and again in early pieces, where they critique both white audiences’ appetites for anti-Black violence and the rewards that come to those who can satisfy those cravings. At the same time, there are poems about the persistent beauty of Black communities, even in the face of generational violence and the unfulfilled promise of progress: Neither exoduses from the Jim Crow South nor the first Black president have improved the lives of most Black Americans.

In “Minneapolis, St. Paul,” and “My Beautiful End of the World,” two mini-essays that cordon off the center of the book, Smith delves into the problems plaguing America’s heartland, ones that are in fact happening all over the country. “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” describes the protests following George Floyd’s murder in diaristic fashion, while “My Beautiful End of the World” chronicles how gentrification is killing the land and restricting access to what remains of its natural beauty. Later poems make clear that the dream of peace and the possibility of a utopia can exist, if in no other place, then in the poetry, right alongside an unabashed reckoning with poverty and racism. Bluff asks, “What shall we do with this land we were never meant to own?” and “How shall we live on it together in the little time we have left?” The answer may lie in the final lines of the book, where the speaker awakens next to a lover and is reminded of the power of the love they make together.

Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires: It interrogates the poet’s past work and revises it, while resisting the powers that threaten to sell us out and sell us short. In the end, it offers joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.