Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

Conceived as a partner piece to the late Kelly Caldwell’s Letters to Forget, Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death is an extended reflection on grief.

If readers choose to read both books (which feels almost necessary), I recommend starting with Letters to Forgetbecause Donish’s collection offers the catharsis that book aches for. The poet dwells in sorrow, but they seem animated by the power of naming it. Where Caldwell’s book is often elusive and bleak, Your Dazzling Death is specific and—surprisingly—hopeful.

Let me explain—

I noted in my review for Letters to Forget that many of those poems wrestle with a world where there is no space for Caldwell, but Donish tenderly creates that space here. That alone feels like an act of hope. These are intensely imagistic and material poems, and they read like an open-armed embrace of Caldwell and all of her pain. They imagine a world with room enough for their love.

I struggle to find a good way to describe the book, but the first word that comes to mind is “symphonic.” The speaker often writes with a euphoric bombast, and it feels like such a conscious response to the self-erasing insularity of Caldwell’s book. These poems are not an elegy—they are a monument. 

They are evidence that grief can expand our capacity for love rather than shrink it.