About
Winner of the Fall 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition
“My sister / is not a woman, a girl, or even / a real someone or something. / Not anymore.” The poems in A Taxonomy of the Space Between by Caleb Curtiss impress fifteen assertions, attempts, and urges toward order on the cavernous and impossible expanse that remains after the speaker’s sister “drove past a stop sign and then, / didn’t do anything ever again.” Curtiss sits right down in the abyss and dwells with the loss, the space where “not wanting a new emergency, / but also, not wanting another old emergency to return$$ we are forced to live with the aching present and the people who continue to exist within it. Probing earnestly at familial and human connection through the smudged and banged-up lens of loss and loss’s aftermath, these poems rebuild the schemas that erode under the weight of untimely death. Through a taxonomy which risks both beauty and longing in the face of irrevocable loss, Curtiss’s poems seek to reorient the world after its nature is revealed to be arbitrary and its motives unknowable.
POEM WITH YOU DRINKING A CUP OF COFFEE
This poem has no occasion.
I edited that out a long time ago.
It, like a body, or like a memory,
has rebuilt itself over time:
each of its component parts
have been exchanged for newer,
more efficient ones, so that now,
when I overhear someone
saying the word “coffee$$
you are drinking a cup of coffee.
Input the output, ad infinitum:
I have become so efficient,
I have even learned
to grieve formulaically,
while the function of your absence
has grown less and less
integral to my algorithm: you
aren’t even you anymore.
First published in New England Review