A REVIEW OF KEVIN MCLELLAN’S IN OTHER WORDS YOU/
in other words you/, Kevin McLellan. The Word Works, Hilary Tham Capital Collection, 2023. 84 pages. $18.00
by Jennifer Martelli
Kevin McLellan’s latest collection of poetry, in other words you/, winner of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, moves us through urgent and liminal spaces as the speaker tries to
identify the language
of his steps / usually
in the crease of their
departure / birth.
Employing epistolary forms, radical lineation, and an almost-violent use of the slash, McLellan’s poems move between lust and fear. They exist in intercepted moments that we, as readers, are allowed to witness; moments where the “you” asks, “. . . do you feel / a part of or apart?” In her essay, “Queer Correspondence: On the Radical Potential of Epistolary Poetry,” Madeleine Cravens writes, “I am interested in poems that capture the speech of longing, and in the poems that attempt to make public illegible, incongruous connection.” In in other words you/, these attempted connections to the “you,” feel personal; the “you” maybe the speaker, the other, or the beloved. The addresses are as tactile as a tongue, yet as temporary as a snowflake, as McLellan writes in “Wintertide,”
your unwritten letter / snow-
flakes
amidst evaporation as they
fall reminding you to stick
out your tongue
The letter poems evoke the distance and longing of Jack Spicer’s poem, “Letter to Gary Bottone,” with their movements through geographical and temporal settings—as well as emotional ones. Like Spicer’s Bohemia— “a dreadful, wonderful place”—McLellan’s Kensington Station in “Furthermore ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’,” recalls a specific time and place of transformation, as well as a time of exile.
Why I returned
stylistically toned down and bodily toned up a decade later? & fell
in love? I haven’t been back—I could waste a thousand years
While McLellan’s use of music—The Culture Club, Madonna, Sinead O’Connor—embeds these
poems in a specific time (those final decades of the 20th century), the body of the letters convey an unsteady landscape. In “Listening to Max Richter’s ‘The Departure’ on Repeat,” the speaker writes to “Dear You” that
a young woman, in the periphery of her peers,
noticed. She continued to look without it feeling like a stare, as
if I was standing in shallow quicksand. I didn’t feel shame at first,
then walked away and only looked back once. I imagined myself
just before out of sight.
This movement of the ground, and of what we see and understand about the edges, is unearthed by McLellan’s lineation. This collection should be a part of a master class on the use of white-space. The liminality is created, in part, by what dangles at the end of McLellan’s lines. Meanings explode—or implode. In the traumatic poem, “License Plate Number,” the speaker is the victim of a hate-crime. Yet, as I read this account, I am forced to stop where the page intrudes, and so, the narrative is disrupted. The page intrudes,
at you / between a taproom and
a blue house an alley / you up
a chain-link fence / the 4-door
Not only does the syntax convey a disorientation of sound and place (“a blue house an alley / you up”), but by isolating this incident by the lines and the slashes, the action morphs into something that is more than dangerous; McLellan creates facets of sexual violence. Breaking the lines at “taproom and” and “you up” underscores not only that small space between physical structures, but the frightening tightness between life and death, and between emotional states. What is the “you” up against? How? Why? We are propelled through this poem, just as the speaker is. McLellan achieves this effect again in “Taken,” where he not only breaks lines, but breaks the meanings of words.
/ remember your 20s? /
the San Fran afr-AIDS
years? / now in the cock-
tail years men your age
disappear once you get
close to them /
Breaking at “cock” opens the line to a few different meanings, until we move down to the next, which completes the sense with “tail years men your age.” The meaning of the line shifts from purely sexual to temporal. The movement from that line, too, is emotionally fraught when the white space between “men your age” transforms the meaning into the politically tragic “disappear once you get // close to them /.” These are muscular poems; their movements physical. The reader must stop, consider, recalibrate the meaning of the poem, and then move forward.
McLellan’s use of the slash forces movement on the line as well. If the epistolary is a means of communication, the slash creates an interruption on the line. I love the different words for the slash: stroke, solidus, oblique, virgule. McLellan’s lines become sliced with a stroke; sense becomes oblique with an either/or. In “The Killing Jar,” McLellan writes,
says out / larvae say out / you
consider fences / do you keep
yourself in or out? / questions
are fences / can’t stop asking /
you consider glass / separation
relevant or irrelevant? /
These interruptions on the line made with this solid, oblique stroke, create what McLellan calls in “Dog-eared,” “the brain-sigh” that allows for shifts
mid-sentence / in
process of
migrating
to the non-paper
world / a bouquet
of disparate sighs
The slashes work as speed bumps that impede the final connection the speaker is attempting. One of the most heart-breaking poems, “Demarcate,” puts the speaker on the edge, or up to
the brink / your
hand between
and not close enough
Kevin McLellan’s poems bridge this space that is “not close enough.” The poems in in other words you/ are urgent messages to the other, to the you—perhaps messages never sent. “Dear you, we are all definitions of record and recording, I might even be human,” McLellan writes in “Furthermore ‘Under Pressure’.” Kevin McLellan offers us humanity as we navigate our way. With a unified voice and sure poetic prowess, McLellan leads us through the vicissitudes of time and self. There is a kindness and generosity to these poems, which invite us in, and remind us all, “Please remember we have yet to meet.”
Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, winner of the Small Harbor Press open reading, In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mates, and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Atticus Review, The Tahoma Literary Review, Scoundrel Time,Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review. www.jennmartelli.com