Letters to Forget

Poems

By: Kelly Caldwell

Narrated by: Elijah Guerra

The debut of Kelly Caldwell, written from within the darkness of bipolar illness and the longing to claim her womanhood

“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.”

With 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 this book, 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: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?

©2024 Kelly Caldwell (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“It is almost impossible to say I feel blessed by Letters to Forget because within it is great pain, loneliness, loss, and ordinary madness. Yet Kelly Caldwell has composed with a lyrical precision and syntactical range that approach transcendence.”—TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices

“Across a mix of epistolary prose-poems, denser and periodized lyrics, and narrative, Kelly Caldwell’s Letters to Forget 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.”—Jos Charles, author of a Year & other poems

“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.”—Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids