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A review by brice_mo
Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen
4.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Tin House for the ARC!
Based on the title, one might expect Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives to be a collection of weightless, wispy poems, but that would underestimate how much heft the book actually has—these are storm clouds, capable of powerful and unexpected turns.
Most of these pieces circle the difficulties of Indigenous identity in a world where mainstream culture has reduced it to racist iconography. We see well-known characters like Tiger Lily or Pocahontas (TM) parasitically leeching off the speaker’s sense of self, highlighting the way colonialism is not a historical event—it’s an ongoing reality. The poet pulls off a remarkable balancing act in her ability to engage with these themes and images without indulging them, and it showcases how cohesive and intentioned the whole project is. The marketing copy for this book invokes Allen’s anthropological impulse, and I think it’s a great articulation of how rigorous this collection feels, both in its methodological precision and the way the speaker reconstructs the present from countless artifacts.
Another aspect of the collection I really admire is how each poem feels like the broken shard of a narrative—the reading experience is often like hearing a heated argument through a wall. There’s a groundedness to the language and a unique cadence to what the speaker reveals or withholds, and both qualities make for a book that seems certain to reward attentive re-reads. Periodically, it slips ever so slightly, as the “Letters I Don’t Send” section feels like a familiar poetic fantasia, but it’s only a minor dip in an excellent collection.
Also, “When I Say I Love You, This Is What I Mean” made me weepy. What a poem.
Based on the title, one might expect Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives to be a collection of weightless, wispy poems, but that would underestimate how much heft the book actually has—these are storm clouds, capable of powerful and unexpected turns.
Most of these pieces circle the difficulties of Indigenous identity in a world where mainstream culture has reduced it to racist iconography. We see well-known characters like Tiger Lily or Pocahontas (TM) parasitically leeching off the speaker’s sense of self, highlighting the way colonialism is not a historical event—it’s an ongoing reality. The poet pulls off a remarkable balancing act in her ability to engage with these themes and images without indulging them, and it showcases how cohesive and intentioned the whole project is. The marketing copy for this book invokes Allen’s anthropological impulse, and I think it’s a great articulation of how rigorous this collection feels, both in its methodological precision and the way the speaker reconstructs the present from countless artifacts.
Another aspect of the collection I really admire is how each poem feels like the broken shard of a narrative—the reading experience is often like hearing a heated argument through a wall. There’s a groundedness to the language and a unique cadence to what the speaker reveals or withholds, and both qualities make for a book that seems certain to reward attentive re-reads. Periodically, it slips ever so slightly, as the “Letters I Don’t Send” section feels like a familiar poetic fantasia, but it’s only a minor dip in an excellent collection.
Also, “When I Say I Love You, This Is What I Mean” made me weepy. What a poem.