Book Reviews

THE LEDGER OF MISTAKES

2024 ERIC HOFFER AWARD WINNER - Honorable Mention in Poetry

"Why remember the dead?" forms the opening line to a poetry collection that embraces the writer's lifelong relationship with her mother. Memories of trying times, cherished moments, youth, aging, final hours, and eventual loss—form a vivid landscape to tread across, stop and observe, pause and feel, and relate. This is honest terrain. Perhaps this is why the dead should not be forgotten. They are embedded in us. What they have given us and what they leave for us, we have become. As the poet writes: "gone now / she inhabits me—".

- Judge’s Comment, Eric Hoffer Award Committee

Why remember the dead?” poet Kathy Nelson begins this sobering meditation, a descent and rise through what’s lost and sometimes found again, her keen eye on the natural world, her mother in the Bardo and in life, both trouble and love restored, unshakable grief, regret, triumph, mystery… And why exactly? Because we need these poems as lens, as touchstone. And such lovely, startling interventions of language and image! Vivid detail, layer upon layer—say, a “landscape stitched with fencerows,” or to hold a breath “until someone unlocks the door.” That someone is this most remarkable poet. “Last night,” Nelson writes, “I found a hidden stairway leading down/into a maze of rooms …” And what a rewarding gift for all of us, to follow her there.

- Marianne Boruch, Bestiary Dark

Kathy Nelson’s Ledger of Mistakes presses loss and regret into beautiful shapes, into poems that can talk and sing and unexpectedly succumb, all at once.  A poet writing a ledger is a poet given to accounting, a poet who doesn’t want to forget. Dimensioned as the contours of Precambrian rock, these detailed poems feel simultaneously wise and true; they are both formally accomplished and emotionally rife. Kathy Nelson has written a masterful first book, a treatise on the complication of loss. Like the speaker at the end of “Easter, 1956,” these poems allow the reader to marvel “at the possibilities of flight” an experience I cherish and shall repeat.

- Sally Keith, River House

A superb example of a poetic sequence that unfolds non-linearly, Kathy Nelson’s collection brings several narrative lines into a pleasing cohesiveness, the strongest tether being the emotional narrative of a complicated relationship between the collection's speaker and her mother. While there is evidence of maternal tenderness withheld, there is also evidence of love displayed which makes evident Nelson's deft handling of her subjects. Her observant eye offers us vivid and stirring scenes, for instance, "I awoke from numb forgetting, remembered—/ oh, the longing—a daughter I’d never known,/ lost in the night. On the horizon, beacons shone,/ but I stumbled in a canyon of talus slopes and boulders./ I never had the dream again and it’s just as well./ A person could be destroyed by such hopelessness./ I have been my mother and I have been my daughter."

- Martha Rhodes, The Thin Wall

WHOSE NAMES HAVE SLIPPED AWAY

Kathy Nelson’s work ministers to the deep places within us: she explores difficult interpersonal arenas with conviction and courage. Her poems are well-crafted, incisive, her narratives compelling. There is one poem in particular, Friends, about a snake, whose imagery is so richly powerful it made me green with envy. Anyone who has a chance to read this book is lucky, indeed.

- Tina Barr Poet

In Kathy Nelson’s exquisitely expressive poems, nature becomes teacher. Nelson writes in the title poem: “I’ve come out to find my bearings” as if nature provides an anchor. She also thinks of those who have gone before her: “…it is their road I walk, /looking for landmarks, signposts.” These brilliant distillations of moments in nature - a rain storm, an ice storm, a hurricane, a “snake coiled like a plate", “a spider standing her ground,” “a robin drop(ping) down, /sudden raptor to a rattling June bug,” the owl, “scouring /for warm blood on the ground” - mirror, and become metaphor for, the eternal struggles between daughters and mothers (and the specter of mother looms large), fathers, lovers, and that longing for rescue from “an infinite cascade into darkness.”

- Nancy Dillingham Poet

CATTAILS

In this evocative debut collection, Kathy Nelson shares with us her fundamentalist upbringing in Texas, her grandmother’s wisdom… “when things are bad, a woman carries on,” her aunt’s bountiful dinner table. She explores love and loss - what is yearned for, what is freely-given or withheld. She tells us, “I wanted love as lush as cattails growing on the banks of the Sabine, love to soak this parched land.”

- Nancy Scott Poet

Kathy Nelson’s first collection of poems reflects a powerfully perceptive life journey. Peering outward from her unique inner experience - she holds, explores, analyzes, savors and ultimately frees her truths. Through her sculpted language, enhanced by deft brush strokes, she renders herself visible, pulling us so completely into her fold that we hear her clear, soft but distinct affirmation: “This is what must not be missed -/ this bright moment.”

- Molly Seale Author

Kathy Nelson’s powerful chapbook Cattails presents a narrative at once mysterious and fully apparent. Focused through the lens of family, class, and place, her tales acquaint the reader with the lost father “familiar as my own face, yet I cannot see you,” with the dark mirage and miracle of daughters. Kathy Nelson’s poems offer unerring personal and cultural histories - there is admirable exactness in her language and striking honesty in the telling.

- Katherine Soniat Poet