Caldwell, Kelly: Letters to Forget (HB)

Knopf, hardcover Publication Date: September 3, 2024 Publisher Marketing: 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 lo