The Naomi Letters

The 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.

Mennies accumulates a personal literary tradition, sharing that language with Naomi, situating these letters in a facilitation of poetry’s figurative powers ... Yet The Naomi Letters does not lecture about how or why poetry will change our sense of language, our selves, through metaphor—instead Mennies’s epistolary poems dramatize, as they interpret and interact with borrowed language, that selfsame power of figurative thought. The Naomi Letters is a record of one’s continued, lifelong reconciliation with their changing body, with the practice of faith situated in historical violence, with what increasingly looks like the volatility of the future ... While these poems will indeed remain in the shape Mennies carefully designed, they will continue to be experienced as words on the page, sounds in our voices—and that process of making will be enacted again, upon each reading, with forever extending timestamps ... The best poems...are made with such specificity, such unmistakable architecture, that hearing them is precisely this experience, this happening. As we actively engage with these poems, and as these poems conduct us through that engagement, their loved and beloved figures seem to almost, almost answer our questions.

... a series of evoca­tive prose poems ... hav­ing ges­tured towards dis­clo­sure...the col­lec­tion, tan­ta­liz­ing­ly, with­holds it ... What makes love hap­pen in the first place and why does it dis­ap­pear? There are no answers to these ques­tions. Yet, the col­lec­tion pro­vides an odd­ly ful­fill­ing emo­tion­al jour­ney. We may not under­stand our­selves, or the peo­ple we love, but Men­nies reminds us that poet­ry accom­pa­nies us in our fraught attempts to nav­i­gate the com­plex­i­ties of the human heart.