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.
