Photography by William Youngblood
Poet Cassie Donish figures that a piece might be done once you finally decide to leave it alone. “Or when it tells you to go away?” she adds. “Or maybe when it gets published.”
As Donish revised her latest manuscript, however, transformative experiences—questioning her identity and queerness—made her reconsider her previous work. For this second collection, also the winner of the 2018 Iowa Poetry Prize, the poet revisited her past work with newfound clarity—and it was only after this that she considered it complete. The Year of the Femme, available April 1, includes poems the Mizzou instructor originally wrote as an MFA student at Washington University. Donish will read from the collection at Left Bank Books on April 9 as part of National Poetry Month.
“I almost felt like I overlaid a grid of my experiences onto these poems that were already written, and they suddenly became about something else,” Donish says. “It’s like the poems were moving with me forward in my life.”
Donish shaped the collection to embrace questions of queerness, gender nonconformity, and interiority. Iowa Prize judge Brenda Shaughnessy wrote, “A bold and redemptive truth is found here, not reliant on answers for its power and meaning.”
Without answers, the questions haunt, building as readers follow such characters as the woman in “The Leaf Mask.” It depicts a woman walking through a park, alluding to Donish’s own walks in Tower Grove Park. Written before Donish identified as queer, the first draft came from a time when she was feeling “confused and distant from my own life,” she says. “I was about to go through a breakup with my ex-fiancé.”
In “Desire and the Social,” Donish raised more questions about queerness, sexuality, and desire. How much of our desire comes from within ourselves? And how much are we conditioned to feel through socialization? Donish doesn’t feel equipped to answer. Again, we’re left to reflect.
Ahead of The Year of the Femme’s release, Donish has been attending readings for her first book of poetry, Beautyberry, released just last December. With an additional forthcoming chapbook, On the Mezzanine, it might be the year of the femme but also possibly the year of Donish.
More not-to-be-missed National Poetry Month readings at Left Bank Books
Ryan Patrick Smith: On April 8, the University of Missouri–St. Louis alumnus reads from his debut poetry collection, The Death Metal Pastorals. Smith’s work tackles consumption, gendered violence, and white supremacy. Author Shane Seely refers to the work as “grave, visionary poems, as dark as they are compelling.”
Stacey Lynn Brown: A poet and professor of creative writing at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Brown visits April 9 to read from The Shallows, in which poems depict a daughter dealing with the aftermath of her father’s stroke and with her own illness.
Alison C. Rollins: On April 17, the St. Louis native brings excerpts from her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes. Within its pages, she explores how we process loss, as well as how race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture interact.
