Another Place Altogether
Kelsay Books, 2025
Kind Words for Another Place Altogether
“Candice M. Kelsey’s Another Place Altogether is a book of sweeping emotional and geographic expanse; of memory, introspection, and resilience; and especially of remaking, the speaker narrating her move from Los Angeles to Augusta, GA and back again, showing how her cultural and environmental landscapes shape her desires to guarantee the adult life she invents for herself is more than she inherits. “I’ve run from your flesh in my flesh, / broken your bone in my bone”—and across these poems, witness the speaker break the cycle of intergenerational trauma and, in an era of political upheaval, raise her children with a love that is fiercely abundant and profoundly self-aware.”
“With a striking and unforgettable voice, poet Candice M. Kelsey’s words will echo well beyond these pages. At its core, Another Place Altogether wrestles with what it means to be “An only daughter [who] is the truthteller, down / like a family wound, wounded and unwound,” and a mother who is “not / a horse / in the legend but / the dragon.” This formally expansive collection asks, “who can reach across the seas of mother and daughter?” These poems are an act of reclamation, in which the speaker learns self-compassion: “how to love, / not to kill.””
“Another Place Altogether probes the delicate often painful bonds within families. From the present to the past, from Augusta, GA to Los Angeles, no relationship is left unexplored in poems of candor, power, and emotion. Beginning at the end, Kelsey invokes the need for “reparenting,” noting that “Adulthood requires an untiling.” A grandmother leaves “a legacy of disordered eating,” and a other's degenerative arthritis is “a mouse climbing through me / his tiny knapsack full / of time location & motion.” Kelsey eleoquently concludes by noting the importance of self-compassion, if not self-forgiveness, and most imporantly, “How to stay.”