BIBFRAME Work

Title

Letters to forget

Type

  • Monograph
  • Text

Contribution

Genre Form

Language

Classification

Content

Summary

"With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the final poems of Kelly Caldwell--many addressed to Cass Donish, her partner in the years before her suicide at 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 refused to affirm her identity. In a 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 us from beyond: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?"-- Provided by publisher.

Authorized Access Point

Caldwell, Kelly, 1988-2020. Letters to forget

Admin Metadata

  • Date: 2026-09-11T20:21:02.513658+00:00
  • Agent: cbc
  • Status: c
  • Derived from: 23419300

Admin Metadata

  • Date: 2026-09-11
  • Cataloger id: Unknown
  • Description level: http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-2-6-0/
  • Description language: eng
  • Description authentication: pcc

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