Black Lawrence Press

37 pages, $8.95

Review by Katie Schmid

Caleb Curtiss’ first chapbook is a chronicle of a sister’s death in a car accident; it is the story of the moment of the death and the moments after. These poems are also poems of memory, as the speaker here watches the past become inflected with (and infected by) the knowledge of the loss that is to come, as in “Self-Portrait With My Dead Sister” where the speaker reflects on a day at the beach with his sister when they were young,

…one will grow up and keep on being real,

while the other will grow up and be dead.

In this memory, the speaker’s sister is already dead though she still lives on the beach. The bald truth of a sister whose memory is both alive and dead seems an obvious enough observation about the nature of loss, but in Curtiss’ poems, it becomes a paradox, something that is troubled and fraught, an obsession—Curtiss questions what it means that his sister can be both real and not real, what it means that he dredges up her memory, over and over, to live in these poems, and finally what the space of grief is for. Continue reading →