Two Minds: Poems

by Callie Siskel

Overview

“[These] poems…are among the most precise and beautiful elegies of our time.” —Richie Hofmann, Rumpus

In a piercing and beautiful elegy for the poet’s father, this debut volume investigates the enduring pain and transformative potential of grief.

Does loss define us, or do we define loss? Tracing the duality of grief as it reverberates through a family, Callie Siskel wrestles with questions of identity and inheritance in precise, lucid poetry. Two Minds indulges and therefore exposes the vanity of turning private pain into art and the pursuit of self-revelation. Drawing on ekphrasis, ars poetica, and the prose poem, Siskel expands the elegiac genre as she oscillates between childhood and adulthood, art and mythology, as well as the natural and domestic world. At once cerebral and emotional, Two Minds is an essential meditation on the ways that loss cleaves and doubles our perceptive power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324116905
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/09/2025
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Callie Siskel is the author of Arctic Revival, winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in the Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and Paris Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

"One of the most idiosyncratic portraits of mourning in recent memory."— J. Howard Rosier Poetry

"Less [an] elegy but rather a celebration of life, then and now.… [W]onderfully touching."— Rick Kogan Chicago Tribune

"Poems that touch on loss, going on, growing up and making loss a part of living."— Scott Simon, NPR

"In Two Minds, the reader is granted a share in [Siskel’s] rich inheritance, the close reading of experience that allows for its transfiguration."— Heather Treseler Harvard Review

"[Siskel’s] spareness and efficiency speak volumes.… These poems rise in their clean, sharp-edged grieving."— Jesse Nathan McSweeney’s

"In these finely wrought lyrics, [Callie] Siskel offers a personal history in the shadow of a father’s early death, considering how absence and loss can shape a life as much as any tangible presence."— Poets & Writers

"With ironic detachment (“There’s a way to position yourself above / where your life is taking place”), Siskel situates grief as self-creation."— Virginia Konchan Poetry

"Direct but nuanced, tender but fierce, Callie Siskel’s Two Minds supposes that if we could see ourselves from just the right angle, we could understand our lives. Born of great loss, these precise lyrics do not aim at consolation alone; no, they struggle eloquently to put the pieces of a life together. Such is the true work of poetry. This is an enormous debut."— Sally Keith, author of The Fact of the Matter

"Callie Siskel’s beautiful and spare poems in Two Minds traverse the delicate yet relentless landscape of grief.… These poems often instigate with a scene from memory or an observation, then they are propelled by the declarative, oftentimes in plain diction and clean syntax.… Maybe in the end, grieving is about the self; as Siskel astutely writes: ‘Vanity and grief / are closer than we think. // Grief’s call-and-response / a mirror of our own making.’ Siskel’s poems are wise and thoughtful, quietly evocative."— Victoria Chang, author of Obit

"Two Minds is a stunning, singular debut. Deeply compelling, it is the wisest book I know about the ways grieving divides us from ourselves. These exquisitely written poems chart with delicacy and nuance the passage we face entering that hall of mirrors appearing before us after great loss. Yet Two Minds is also a poetic reflection on the wholeness we reconstruct upon reentering the world.… An instant classic."— David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

"In Two Minds, the hungers of loss, love, and familial bonds intersect at the interstices of art and memory. With a palette knife, Callie Siskel scrapes at the raw face of elegy, revealing interior forms on a canvas where the poet’s father lives beyond death. Reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, these intimate poems achieve an enduring, painterly resonance that is startling and lucid in language."— Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body

From the Publisher