Reading Alexis Almeida’s Caetano feels like finding a dragonfly on a summer walk and bringing it home to place on a windowsill. Rejecting the usual forms of record-keeping—photographs, talking, storytelling, or little artifacts—as unstable, as if the small object brought indoors could properly account for the feeling one had upon finding it, Almeida turns to the poem as a new method of preservation. The poem that addresses Caetano, the book’s namesake and Almeida’s late grandfather whom she never met, catalogs a room filled with unfamiliar objects, where an exchange with a flower outside the window happens as time dissolves around her, and the inherited memory of her late grandfather is replaced with her newborn son: “moving / towards it, / this long / lost memory, / this new / person.” Elsewhere, Almeida records phase changes as fact rather than image, collectivizing memory: “and without visually seeing / the blue turn to green, / the memory of the blue / was sitting inside all / of them.”
Almeida’s poems are not exactly talky, but they are dialogical. She often writes at the behest of others, and so Caetano places her in conversation with contemporary poets Roberta Iannamico, Mónica de la Torre, Renee Gladman, Isaac Jarnot, Lewis Warsh, as well as with the reader, her son, unnamed phantom interlocutors: “Here, said the ghosts, steadying my shoulders in the hospital, and in your scream I heard the rest of my life.” Almeida writes, “I often close my eyes when I’m rushed.” Caetano reads like an instruction manual for how to remember our commitments to ourselves and to one another when confronted with a destabilizing force, “what becomes locked when you pull.”
Made up of six discrete sections that present different recording frames, the book becomes its own account of Almeida shaping waiting into idea. In “Photographs,” Almeida keeps track of beginnings and departures that revolve around a chorus of ever-present friends: someone passes away, the poet waits, a child is born, wedding photos arrive from the future, dreams take place in fields, we riot, again the poet waits. “I Have Never Been Able to Sing” is made of sentences fixated on negation, many of which start with the phrase “I have never,” and include considerations like, “Do people walk to escape walking.” In “Things I Have Made A Fiction,” each poem begins with "I wrote a book": “I wrote a book where I wanted to make certain things touch,” “I wrote where I imagined I could talk to people I no longer talk to.” This way of recording details, not in terms of images or conversations but as an account of what could have happened, allows the poems to “leave something opening in the sentence.”
Almeida’s work often reminds me of the writer Renee Gladman, whose novels often include accounts of past disappointments, and where failed attempts at projects, not necessarily meaningful on their own, are often what make the next one possible, like her 2008 novel To After That (TOAF), where she describes the process of abandoning one book for another. Reflecting on a book, either this one or another, imagined one, Almeida writes:
I wrote a book where I tried to make a list of the recent photographs I had taken, but each time I wrote something—like “a wire sticking out of the wall socket”—it became “a wire stuck out of the wall socket that looked like a cattail” and started to form a narrative… So it went on this way, where inside the lists were other lists that started to leak and form paragraphs, and the longer I wrote them, the more it felt like something was happening (a wave), and what I had wanted, or failed to want was taking on the particular shapes of these sentences.
While a cliché understanding of the photograph—say, it almost feels like my grandfather is alive! I can see how he might have laughed!—might offer perfunctory comfort, Almeida creates an alternative where the record’s inability to hold what we might want or need it to makes writing possible. Almeida cautions against embellishment, seeking pure description instead of narrative. Here, we find a formal spiraling, where she depicts the process that turns a thought into a sentence, evoking Gladman’s project “Plans for Sentences,” as Caetano's photographic descriptions echo Gladman’s schematics. Elsewhere in the book, photographs are wet and dynamic, records that cannot stay in a single place.
In the section titled “To-Do List,” Almeida returns to a pregnancy and early infancy journal told through a to-do list that maintains a spectral presence over the poem, delivered in the second person, where time takes on various, almost delirious, formal qualities, mostly to do with weight. Reading Almeida’s writing through early motherhood in Caetano sent me back to Bernadette Mayer’s “Eve of Easter,” which I had remembered as a poem that was angry about the fact that Mayer had to be completely responsible for taking care of children as a result of men’s failure to take on reproductive labor. I was looking to put the presence of the anger in Mayer’s poem in contrast with the creative act of mothering I found in Almeida’s. Mayer maps Hawthorne, Melville, and Milton, “the great ones,” onto three babies under her care, sleeping in the next room, and she is at once reverential and disdainful of both these writers and, transitively, these children and the work they require. The poem ends, “I lost the prejudice of paradise / And wound up caring for the babies of these guys.”
Upon rereading, I remembered that the “babies of these guys” didn’t just refer to Lewis Warsh’s children, but that the babies in the poem are inheritors, interlocutors, or literally these male authors from the past, in whose lineage Mayer stands. Where I expected anger and frustration, the poem emphasized the generative potential of life with children: “I made the lucent dark / I stole images from Milton to cure opacous gloom.” In Mayer’s work, the obligation for reproductive labor is not in opposition to the ability to write—taking care of children does not stop a woman writer from creative freedom. Rather, finding new forms of record-keeping aligns creatively with childrearing and might be energized by it.
In a poem of Almeida’s that depicts the same time of day across several days, it is a child asleep in the next room that makes writing possible. She writes:
panicking about what I hadn’t written, putting Ash to bed early and disappearing somewhere into the unwritten book, how it might move in and out of it, drape itself over a chair to write another body, reach backward toward something it wanted, walk down into the city with someone I love.
The book turns into a character, develops its own motion and desires, and draws Almeida up into it. In the clause “it might move in and out of it,” the object pronoun becomes a site of transformation as “it” could refer to the unwritten book, the act of writing, or the panic itself. The book, the time, and Almeida each have a life of their own. Almeida, like Mayer, emphasizes the presence of a child as generative and describes the experience of parenthood as akin to or supportive of writing, but she takes the question elsewhere, describing how one can maintain continuity with their life before and after having a child. Mayer, on the three babies: “they all see the light by which I write,” suggesting that the babies, though sleeping, share this hour with her, witness her through it, and, it may follow, help her write. Throughout Caetano, the appearance of Alexis’s son Ash often causes a formal shift in the poem: where she can’t figure out wwhere she can’t figure out which “line” to take, as in “the line Ash kept drawing in shades of yellow that he called a sunburn became my life.”
I finished writing this review at my friend Camilla’s kitchen table, after spending the day with her and her six-month old son, whom I took for a rainy walk through Kensington, past the cemetery, thinking about Almeida and her son Ash. Though I am not a parent, as I read Caetano I would find myself picturing a child sleeping in the next room, integrating that imagined fact into my own life such that I, too, might be able to turn away from myself and “become everyone,” as Almeida does, with a wink at herself and at the reader. Motherhood itself, in Almeida’s hands, becomes its own form of record-keeping. And while the early days one spends with an infant reconfigure one’s relationship to time and obligation, precluding any form of proper record-keeping, as Almeida notes, “You were saying things to be close to them, and saying made you tired; you were trying to remember this feeling, or a certain sensation as it passed through your body, and it always seemed like starting over, but this is not so different from before you had a son.”