Letter That Never

Poetry. Imaginary autobiographies of the disappeared, these poems grab us by the throat in a frightening way, yet each is so beautiful that we keep going back to meet another and another. Soon we are bursting with the miracle: how strange it is that we survive suffering, and more: that we transcend. Personal and political, this book astonishes.

In LETTER THAT NEVER, the tender project of 'being in charge of a life' joins the poetic project of 'the fracturing of every thought into what pure word.' With each of these 'imagined autobiographies'--unnamed, evocative, formally inventive--Ann Pelletier seeks, seeks to offer, a haunting solace at the edge of forgetting and being forgotten.--Carol Snow

Working from disparate materials--from the article 'Children of the Dirty War' (about 'los desparacidos' of Argentina) to A Sierra Club Naturalists Guide--Ann Pelletier has written a riveting series of poem-fragments on themes of departure and return, isolation and community. The result is a striking meditation on lostness--the political and historical, as well as the existential. This is an 'open book, ' a mosaic of possibilities haunted by actuality ('meat-eating bees') and one's own mind. The reader will also be reminded of our current political situation: 'these were the dark days of trial / take away my voice / dress / undress / duress.' Wonderful work!--Paul Hoover

Pelletier's LETTER THAT NEVER draws us into the 'rustling' of imagined confidences. Here, the first person pronoun is shattered, cast before us as an 'I, scattered with stones.' Pelletier's imaginings are brilliantly attuned to sound (of bird call, fraying leaves, random winds, ravenings); the autobiographies of those 'setting a pattern for suffering, ' for solitude, silence, those imprisoned or lost. Pelletier beckons into speech not only silenced humanity, but also those elemental spirits with which we share our earthly/unearthly world. Animals and birds, 'moonlight smudged by the lumpy land, ' 'the hills and the stars and the waters' reveal their presences and yet remain undiscoverable, inviolable. Every page of this gorgeous book is creased and folded with mystery, with unanswerable song.--Barbara Tomash