Overview

I Can't Recall Exactly When I Died opens with a beautifully written poem framed within loneliness: the speaker must tackle the disintegration of everything. This metaphor for melancholy pushes through the collection. As the narrative moves from marriage to divorce, a realization arises: ""My body has an instinct to survive."" In the extraordinary ""Corona of Fragmentation,"" the destruction of the speaker's past is complete, though pieces linger like a memory tripwire. The next seven poems reinforce this as each last line deftly begins the next poem, threading pain into one long lament. The last section finds the speaker pushing and pulling the weight of her past until the memories become unimportant. ""We pack our belongings / and go our separate ways, not even bothering / to calculate our impressive collection of faults."" This is progress married to uncertainty. The excellent closing poem, ""My Ex and I Empty the Storage Unit,"" shows that hope and ambivalence coexist, and that is enough. -Christine Klocek-Lim, editor of Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY In I Can't Recall Exactly When I Died, Diane Elayne Dees's words construct the walls and furnish the rooms of a house, allowing the reader to enter a space filled with varied emotions and frequent hauntings of various versions of one's former self. While the poems chronicle the visceral experience of a damaged marriage and the solitude after divorce, even I, as a never-married reader, felt a deep connection to the emotional sentiments expressed in the frankness of her poems. It is a treasured and sometimes teary-eyed collection to read alone, yet it is also the perfect collection to read out loud with a few friends over coffee or a good bottle of wine. -Kay Kestner, editor of Poetry Breakfast

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