Letters to Forget

"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: 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?"--