Endorsements
Kind Words for Still I am Pushing
“Still I am Pushing, Candice Kelsey’s debut poetry collection, is remarkable for the unflinching eye it casts on daughterhood and motherhood, on the terrors and, sometimes, beauties of childhood, on the complexities of our bodied lives. In intense and clear vignettes with structural allusions to classic literature, Kelsey mines the depths of her life, and by association our own lives. As she writes: “steaming/inside every bone cold plate I bury/in the cupboard/ my mother, every mother.” This is a remarkable first book—powerful and wise.”
“What a stunning, sobering and heartbreaking collection this is. These poems, constellating around the speaker’s relationship with her mother, are extraordinary reflections on a past that seemed intent upon demeaning misjudgments and willful misunderstandings. These powerful poems gather, one by one, into a lyrical and triumphant confrontation with the ghosts of that past. This is a book every mother, every daughter will want to read.”
“This skillfully crafted collection both aches with struggle and shines with strength. In Still I Am Pushing, Candice Kelsey’s spare, haunting, and lyrical voice explores the shadowy spaces between mother and daughter, self and mirror, body and breath. This collection sings.”
A Catalogue of Little Survivals: A Review of Still I am Pushing by Candice M. Kelsey
By Poet Adedayo Agarau, author of The Arrival of Rain
I returned from school that afternoon in a pool of blood; my stitched fingers tore because a boy pushed me off the stairs. My mother’s impatience, the urgency in her livid blood, motherhood heavy that afternoon as her lips shivered. Everything still glitters and shines. Memory, if visited, is a museum of dust and shallows, shadows of dark days leaning against the walls as they do in Still I am pushing. It is incredible how we walk through an entire existence wishing we had pushed the button, held despair by the wrist, shouting, white puppies will be drowned.
Poetry is capable of bringing the lamb out of the fire, capable of casting shadows out of pigs, capable of constructing a miracle. And these miracles, in their most delicate artistry, are the words of Kelsey in this book. As I climb into these poems with her in Small Places I’ve Filled, I am reminded that the body will somehow give itself to dust. My grandmother, the morning she was going to die, called my father and cried over the phone. Her grief was as loud as heavy thuds of birds falling out of the sky. We have all come to fill small holes on earth, and my grandmother, who could not hold on to her place, opened the ground for herself like bodies do coffins. Poetry is a revelation, its imagery of things unfelt, the imagination that someone who never existed leaves. It is impressive how a poet is able to give you her grief, and you, as a reader, are unable to resist the beauty of its invocation, take it whole.
I was seventeen, angry, and depressed because I had had it all rough growing up when I said my first no to a woman who tried to retake a pinch of me. I have lived in fear of saying no, what is to come after rejecting a bigger force. But I see myself in Fearless Girl, as a boy in this case, who is never heard. It is incredibly stunning how silence grows out of us like an oak tree, its violent branches spreading like new nerves.
Kelsey, in Fearless Girl, reaffirms why this gorgeous and evocative book is titled Still I am Pushing. The struggle of growing with a body that does not like to see, and pushing out of a song that wakes you out of your sleep, in which the song is your own body, who is 250 pounds of bronze.
Poetry, in all its magic, does not cease to bridge gaps, as it has done in Keklsey’s I Hold My Father’s Beer. In this poem, there are photos, little 4x4 firecrackers turning golden moments into a frozen silence.
I crave my father’s cool, wet bottle of beer
and imagine the bitter sip
going down like
a mother’s expectations.
It is, however, surprising how Kelsey finds a way to bring herself out of the waters, how she swims back to shore, to present herself as a survivor. The tenacity of her person hides beneath her experiences, how a silent girl has warped so much strength to bellow this loud through poetry.
Still I am Pushing is a striking collection about parenting, family, loss, growing up, and the struggles of motherhood. It is as bizarre as it can be, confessional as it can get, but we would not have enough of the truth that has come to pierce in this book. The book asks questions that beg to be answered, in silence, heads down thinking of how the world spins along an orbit. How in God’s name did we survive? How in God’s name did we get here, in Still I am Pushing?
