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 transformat...