Letters to Forget Poems

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 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: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?

A trans poet, writer, and visual artist, KELLY CALDWELL was the winner of the Norma Lowry Memorial Prize and the Cornelison English Prize from Washington University in St. Louis, an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and the 2019 Greg Grummer Prize. Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, and VICE. She was founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of The Spectacle. Caldwell died in March 2020.  At the time, she was living in Columbia, MO, with her partner, the writer Cass Donish. She was posthumously awarded an honorary PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis.