PositiveThe Kenyon ReviewThe meticulous form of the book—from an abiding commitment to strophes, to the dates of the letters, to chronology—shows us a speaker immersed in acts of devotion both sacred and profane ... Buried in the devotion to formal precision is the deep pain of being unseen and untouched by Naomi, the figure who is already gone. In The Naomi Letters, Mennies’s speaker writes lines that won’t ever be seen by the desired. The speaker is left with us, the readers—a notion that someone else might witness what has happened between these two, even if the bodies have no record of it. More painfully, some of us might even read the poems in the same fashion in which the speaker wrote them—as a kind of prayer: not one that ends in desire but in light.
