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Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

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DRESSING IN THE DARK, Kathleen Flenniken, Lynx House Press, 2025.

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Here is one poem for you—though I could have chosen any, a whole book of new favorites.

61

I remember myself as my own child

pinned at the chest to a list of wishes.
This isn’t the way I expected her to turn out.

I confused my inside and outside,
chose to be inscribed and circumscribed.

What would it mean to embrace myself?
my hands holding hands, packages, keys.

Balance required me to concentrate
on the doorknob, the groceries.

For much of my life I wanted to feel denied—
the principle of the grapefruit diet, of Odysseus

lashed to the mast while the sirens sang.
I trained on half-price racks of turtleneck sweaters.

We speak of ambition, the chef instead of the cook,
but Mother sat at a table

writing Christmas card after Christmas card
four days running every year.

Then she made the lebkuchen, shortbread,
and fruit cake. The true listener

doesn’t distinguish inside from outside.
She counts them the same. Bird song

and whatever you still could be.

—Kathleen Flenniken

You can find five more poems from Dressing in the Dark at New World Writing Quarterly.

Kathleen was Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2012-2014. Visit her website to learn more about her. Order  her books at bookshop.org or your local independent bookshop.

Melissa Kwasny’s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

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Who is Melissa Kwasny? How is it that I hadn’t known of her before this? How did she come to write this startling book?

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, the 2017 entry in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series, simply blows me away. It’s perhaps a tough sell to a general audience, but I’m going to try. (With one opening couplet that reads thus: “Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain. / They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.” What on earth will this poem be about?) It was not the sort of book I normally set out to read in one day. These are poems that one needs to mull over, to live with. Ultimately, it’s a book I will keep on my shelf to reread at a slower pace. A book that I already know will reward rereading.

Here is one prose poem from a series of 6 titled “Another Letter to the Soul”:

 

4.

You are the sound of rain, if it weren’t falling but rising from below, a ground-nester, not a tree one, such as the bobolink or longspur, created below our feet, like the oil is. Rain in the ears and snowmelt rushing through the heart, a distant sound, as of the past retreating. Though loud, continuing its retreating presence. What can the flood teach me about you? I see frothing at the surface and watch myself pulled in, as if identity were an antithesis to gravity. Yet not knowing is part of you, whether I sink or swim, whether I abandon the body or stay and fight for it. When someone says, “you will know when the time comes,” does she mean the soul speaks? What part, then, indecision, net of doubts we might call debris, web of plastic tape roping off the danger? Mudbanks where the deer’s leg sinks in?

–Melissa Kwasny

I’ve been fascinated by the soul, by the concept of the soul, since I was a kid. I won’t go into that right now, except to say that Kwasny’s book shows me that I am not alone in my obsessions. (And floods! “What can the flood teach me about you?”) Her poems make me want to open my notebook and write my own meditations, to ride them as far as they will take me, even if I end up falling into a mudbank. First, after all, there’s the soaring.