Candice Kelsey's "Choose Your Own Poem" Reviewed by James Diaz

​
You might remember those interactive books encountered once as a child and teen that were a part of the “choose your own adventure” series. Surely you remember the thrill of a book that invited you to participate in the reading journey in a way that felt not just thrilling but empowering. One felt not just like an active participant but also a kind of co-creator of stories, and in many of us no doubt was kindled there a kind of invitation to a life of storytelling of our own making. 

    In Candice Kelsey’s ambitious and powerful chapbook, Choose Your Own Poem, the reader is invited to participate in the poet’s journey, which becomes our journey as well, where the choices we make will alter not just where the book goes, but we as well with it. Doesn’t all poetry do this, in a way? Perhaps. Yet there is something uniquely democratic in a poem that becomes even more evocative and palpable when wedded to the interactive journey found here in this book. 

    The book opens in “The Cave of Misogyny…” where Kelsey uses the mating rituals of stinkbugs to metaphorize the ways in which an “infestation [of misogyny] can derail the emotional tone of a home”. Against the option of playing the cruel game of making oneself small and going along to get along in the culture of belittlement and erasure that women face, Kelsey proposes another: to squash them. To set a boundary so firm, a soul-line not to be crossed or erased, that others can see it coming like a lantern in the night, and know that here travels one who will not consent to shrinking themselves down from the inside, for anyone, no matter what. A daily choice, an agonizing upkeep of the everyday when confronted with a perpetual violence and disrespect. One’s home, at least, must somehow be made a safe place in a world of wolves at every door. 

    “If you choose to smile more”, Kelsey writes, “turn to page 11.” But “if you choose to escape all oppressive systems, turn to the next page”. In both choices we find ourselves confronted with the violence of misrecognition and unseeing. In the next page we read in “Beyond Escape” of a shame that has been tracking one for months on an “open path strewn with strange” where Candice writes in a powerful closing that: 

    “you will always be who they believe you are. The narcissist will forever blame you. Hope scissored away, you are left with the invisible giggles of Obligation, the shrieks of flying monkeys & no treasure to trade for freedom.”

    Had we chosen to smile more we would find ourselves, in “The Phantom Submarine” “Sunk from the torpedoing” of the kind of artifice the world demands in which, whatever joy would accrue in our own choosing of how to appear before the world, is stripped from one and made into a kind of forced ritual where worth is bound to the perception of beauty. “You dart your eyes toward the mirror”, Kesley writes in closing:
 
to see if you
have surfaced still pretty
or at least still soft as flesh.”

Our choices:

“If you have surfaced pretty,
turn to page 18.
If you have not surfaced pretty,
turn to the next page.”

    Throughout “Choose Your Own Poem” one finds this kind of internal and external tension, an emotional tug-of-war, between competing voices, one that is perhaps part of what D. W. Winnicott calls one’s “true self” and "false self.” The true self rages against injustices done to the core of who one is, the false self is the compliant self, made to perform a role that is unfaithful to who one really is, and yet it is in the perpetual performing of falsity that one’s true self lets out a primal scream of “enough!”

    And such is the powerful, searing message of this adventure: to come home to oneself, to live in a place of peace and not anxiety, is to transform the strange strewn on our path (and it is strange to not recognize one in their unique and deserving human integrity, to attempt to deny them their own self-cohesion outside the cruel darting eyes in the caves of misogyny) to make not just a room of one’s own, but a world of one’s own. 

    Reading Kelsey’s powerful chapbook, one is reminded of Monique Wittig’s “Les Guerilleres” and other works by the author, which expound a world in the making by woman who have had enough of the infestation of the soul that is the world we live in, a world we have made, a world of choices at every turn of the page in our lives, rather than to combat the darkness of the cave where:

“notes &
hopes melt into shadows / you adopt a concealing posture / squeeze yourself between the other
puppets & prisoners”

    The invitation of this adventure is to look into the eye’s of one’s true self and to howl back at the dark of man who dare to make of the world a place so uncomfortable and unlivable as to exhort us to “never exhale” let alone draw clear and firm the boundary which separates us from those who deny us full integrity as a part of a whole grown so sick that it must now be made new by a battle cry not just of “enough”, but of all the notes not yet played in the new music of the world. An orchestra not of false notes and selves, but of true one’s. In this new place, perhaps, one looks into the mirror and finds a partner in oneself that is not coupled to the corruption of the current day, that chooses justice, dignity, and integrity over the dollar, the demand to be still and quiet, and the dismantling of our souls, but instead a place of peace and boundary-line. A place to breathe and exhale freely, a place to just be left alone. Respected and accepted for who, not what, one is. 

    Kelsey’s “Choose Your Own Poem” is a work of all those things the world works so hard to deny so many, the right to be safe in one’s body, home, work, life, love, heart, and soul. It empowers the reader not just by inviting us to leave the dark cave of blind misogyny, but by dynamiting the entrance that lies behind us.

    Indeed, it truly is a new world now that lies ahead of us in the making. And that world, perhaps, is exemplified best in the turning of a blank page. What comes next is the song of the true self unshackled from the cave and tethered to its new song, one the words to which the world has never known, but surely soon will. One can hear the final glorious notes still playing long after one has closed the last page of this searing and transformational book.



Candice Kelsey’s “Choose Your Own Poem” is available now from Cherry Dress Press and Amazon.


CANDICE M. KELSEY [she/her] is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist from Ohio and living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. Her work appears in Passengers Journal, Variant Literature, and The Laurel Review among others. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice also serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Find her @candice-kelsey-7 @candicekelsey1 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com.