A Review: The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You by Caits Meissner and Tishon

The distinguishing feature of this poetry collection is not, in fact, the poems—though they are good—but the book’s genesis. As Tishon and Meissner explain in the introduction: “…we’ve been friends for roughly five years. In those five years we’ve shared countless letters. These letters aren’t letters in the true sense of the word. They are poems….” Born from the intimacy of friendship and given to the world by Tishon’s own Well&Often Press, The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You opens the authors’ lives to their new friends—all of their readers.

Despite my initial concern about the continuity of a co-authored collection, I was impressed by the poems’ overlap and by the collection’s structure, which hops between the authors’ poems as each addresses familial loves, old friends, and memories of early homes. Each has stronger works and lesser. Meissner’s “First Loves (For Alec),” the only prose poem in the collection, captures the confusion of childhood loves (she quietly reveals that Alec is her cousin), their ambiguities, and their persistence:

Under the moon I’ve heard the sharp-toothed blue fish of your cries after too much drink and the girls who you broke and broke you. How I can’t stop dreaming of that impure man beneath a willow tree and all the ways I rot inside when over and over again he leaves and leaves and leaves, like my fate is on repeat, my face in the mirror has a yellow sheen and I pull fat away from my body with my fingers—just two of the reasons I am sure no breathing man could love me.

In the same section, Tishon reveals iconic moments in his relationships with his mother and brother. For the former, he recalls “the first time / she called me stupid” and how that incident engendered his own disaffection. In the following poem, “Sitcom,” he considers how television reflects and affects his life, including his judgments of his younger brother:

He thinks Full House
is boring
and that makes me proud.

This collection often reveals much more than it conceals, following the strain of confessional poetry and the logical purpose of epistles. Readers will encounter Meissner’s defiant youth—“Because hair sprouted from my arm pits, raised like tiny fists / and I scorned any girl who put a razor to her perfect prickly skin”—and Tishon’s lost friend—“but nothing rings louder than the phone call / of a warm body crashing to concrete.”

The risk of confessional poetry is becoming too explicit, too much like an open-faced letter to a friend; Meissner’s poems are most affecting when she delves into denser verse that requires some deciphering, like “Last Night I Dreamt of You Wanting Me Again” and “Kissing.” Tishon’s best, though never dense, contain poignantly simple reflections that make me scribble exclamation points in the margins, as in “Sometimes”:

and sometimes,
when no one is watching
I pick up sticks and place them in my pocket
so they can feel like they belong to something again.

The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You captures the vitality of a burgeoning friendship; it tells the stories necessary for friendship to bloom. The book’s lengthy title could have been nothing else—after reading the collection, I felt closer to these poets than to many friends who do not write letters to me. A great success lies in the authors’ ability to transform letters to each other into letters to all of us.

*       *       *

BONUS: The collection’s release party is tonight at the Housing Works Bookstore, 7:00pm. Click through for more information, and go support these talented local writers!

DOUBLE BONUS: Tishon, Meissner, and Well&Often Press are all on Tumblr.

The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You by Caits Meissner and Tishon
Well&Often Press, January 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9836314-0-8. 76 pgs. 

Notes

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    PARTY TONIGHT, here,...this book! It’s free! There’s going
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