Your Dazzling Death

"Queer writers Cass Donish and Kelly Caldwell were life partners for four years, until Caldwell's suicide in March 2020. Side by side, they wrote poems and explored their evolving gender identities, navigating Caldwell's severe bipolar disorder and rejection by a family that didn't accept her as a woman. In Your Dazzling Death, Donish shares with their absent lover and with the reader an ongoing conversation about the self, intimacy, and an experience of love and loss that transcends time. In this unprecedented collection, Donish elegizes Caldwell and summons the courage to witness their own life, widowed and isolated as a global pandemic began to unfold. With searing honesty and a bravery that refuses to turn away from the traumatic loss, exposing deep humility and vulnerability, they find a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation and anguish of grief; they recall the joy of Caldwell's becoming, as together they "sounded out" / your new potential names / until we found those syllables ...which tasted, you said, like having / a future". Now that their shared life is forever ended, Donish turns to ritual and natural cycles in order to survive; they find in the words that they once said to Caldwell have a new place on the page. In "Kelly in Violet," the centerpiece of this collection, the story of Caldwell's death emerges, partly in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose poetry allowed Donish to access the shattering event and appears here in ghostly traces. Your Dazzling Death memorializes a particular woman, ritualizes the work of grief and love, and subverts linear time, asserting that a future with new love and partnership in it will be informed forever by a monumental love that is still alive in the past"--