everything saved will be last

Here are poems that crackle with intelligence and terror. Here is an awareness rueful enough to brood over the racialized call to write rage (“at least … as density not darkness”), saving the acridest ironies for pages saturated into dense, dark mirrors. And who finds what there? A reversal, a self, a piece of the poet? That mirrors may scry, reflect, and distort, Isaac Pickell works over, taking lyric’s simultaneous introspection/exhibitionism, he stands in the thick of conflicting gazes and views. This is being up in his US where “they tell us to just hang/in there ….” And who finds what there, among bricks, teeth, and matchsticks? I found a place I’ve seen before, but never at these keen angles.

—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies and The Black Automation

Vulnerability and the desire for an open reconciliation with the self are key themes in Isaac Pickell’s debut chapbook, alongside what it means to be a human being with an interracial heritage. Unlike some writers who identify as mixed race, Pickell does not choose the easy route of using the buffer of whiteness to his advantage, “we could look/so pretty outside: liberty, still/that very bitter joke.” What could life outside of the white supremacist racial caste system look like? Pickell has no answers but gives us reflexive warnings: “do not present a problem without a solution because you will get used to it.”

—Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of Crawlspace and Houses

In everything saved will be last, Isaac Pickell renders an ambient world of quiet objects and reverie, a peacefulness of the built environment and, simultaneously, the impossibility of maintaining this quiet, pensive world for more than a moment. In these poems, the reverie is disrupted, over and over. These poems don’t give us any out. Pickell “[picks] the splinters out from history” and then “[piles] them crosswise into a cabin,” the place we’re going to dwell. This gorgeous and unnerving work picks apart the material of daily life, haunted by its location in larger structures, and itemizes what we have to work with in building something else.

—Marie Buck, author of Unsolved Mysteries and Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul