Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s latest collection, Winter of Worship, is a collection steeped in grief, compulsively obsessed with time and slowing it, or reorganizing it—making it mappable in such a way that maybe, loss won’t feel so prevalent. Through crisply constructed poems including ghazals, haibuns, and the poet’s invented form, the Marble Run, Candrilli grasps at lost queer futures, knowledge, and innocence. The poems serve as an orientation, as in the poem “One Hundred Demons,” where the poem’s speaker, once “just a child in the woods,” maps themselves out of the experience of loss, as “Children in a forest / depend on verse, limerick, the iambs / of wind throbbing through birch trees.”
The collection covers expansive ground: elegies for the poet’s people (family and chosen family), but also elegies written in anticipation of the loss of the earth to climate change, humanity to the fervor of imperialism, racism, transphobia, the dwindling of the middle class, and the loss of those to drug use: prescription or otherwise. Through all this loss, Candrilli’s poetics deftly experiment with slowing time, insisting we as readers follow through language as Candrilli narrows our focus onto singular objects, scenes, or moments: a long drive after a late night work shift, a midnight claw for intimacy from a partner, a walk through the woods with a grandfather, collecting bottles. The strict meter and structure of childhood slips away as rapidly as does the speaker’s closeness to the moments of significance encased in memory—as in the opening couplet of the collection’s first poem, “From Above”:
It’s a new year, and each oyster I open re-injures
My two-seam shoulder, my curveball bones.
We’re given the new year—a traditional marker of fresh starts, time conceptualized as unburdened by its past, hopeful for its future, then immediately launched into the iambic pentameter of the following clause, “each oyster I open re-injures,” then slipped into the next line, in which everything slows. The meter doubles. Through the dull throbs of “two-seamed shoulder” and “curveball bones,” the poem reaches something more tangible and embodied, as the image of America glistens on a baseball field, and the speaker endeavors once again to access memories that become further and further away from the present, through cultural markers specific to moments in time for the American consumer:
There, I ate only Swedish Fish, and kissed
the most beautiful girls, ducked behind dugouts
I remember their flowering Nokia phone cases,
mainly, and how they all knew I was a boy
and whispered so. While I’m in the air, flying coach
Swedish Fish and Nokia phone cases are remembered amongst whispers of queer knowledge, before the poem returns us to a present, removed moment—“While I’m in the air, flying coach”—the line break here when paired with the previous image of baseball fields calls to mind the image of a thrilled child demanding attention from a baseball team’s coach—look at me and this miraculous thing I’ve done! The speaker’s wonder at both the accessing of memory as well as its contents (kissing the most beautiful girls and being seen as a boy) is propulsive, sending the speaker back into the present and into a position of literal flying on an airplane above the earth, where we then exit the poem, “flying,” occupied by the anticipation of the act of remembering:
cut from the grassland. Each time I am
kissed, I smell sunflower seeds. I smell
yellow before she even arrives.
In this collection, the speaker is often given an entry to the past through an anchoring of memory around objects or specific places: Furbys, Nokia phones, Atlantic City, a South Philly sidestreet, “the street as the sun we cannot see, sets.” These cultural signifiers of specific moments in time appear throughout the collection as Candrilli reaches for orientation through the deluge of memory for people and places lost to time, accessed first through these very signifiers: Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon, Mac Miller, the iPod classic, a Megabus, the Energizer Bunny, OxyContin, Dale Earnhardt, Olive Garden, Venmo, and an old Chevrolet.
As a fellow millennial from the East Coast of America, these are all brands and branded objects that orient me quite specifically. Maybe I haven’t accessed these objects in decades, but when they are mentioned, I too am placed somewhere specific in time: the sensations of my experience of the past all fall immediately into place. If I attempt to access memory through sensation first, I struggle: there’s a commonly repeated scientific concept that scent is connected to memory, and a single smell can awaken memories previously unrealized to a person. Perhaps that has been true for people in the past, but for a generation raised in tandem with the accelerated development of technologies such as television, the internet, and social media, somehow it is easier to remember where you were when you first saw a Budweiser SuperBowl ad then it is to remember a meal shared with family as a child. There’s a pressure felt from the accelerated product cycles of contemporary life, especially as they develop as signifiers in relation to the course of millennial adolescence: the Nokia phone so rapidly replaced by the iPhone or Android; the Walkman eclipsed by the iPod classic. What does it say of the American mind that sometimes, we are best (or easiest) able to access our memories through branding? Our memories, often the only way we can access our dead, contaminated through the same channels as are our families by opiate crises, by our city streets, and by, as Candrilli details throughout the collection, “copper busts / of men who believed only in genocide,” or the soft dirt of our woods littered with “the smooth green glass of an old 7UP,” “aspirin bottles,” “the amber glass of morphine,” “sometimes heroin”—like weeds. It’s not ideal, Candrilli supposes, still attempting to access memory through scent and image as much as through these consumerist-oriented signifiers of time and place. The branding is pervasive. Even “Pennsylvania,” a name that carries a certain form of American branding: colonial imposition on a place—but, Candrilli muses in lines later in the collection, “We understand our lives with that which we are given.”
Time expands and contracts in Candrilli’s Winter of Worship, an acuteness performed in the poet’s attention to moments of return, not least of all through the execution of their invented form, the Marble Run, which takes inspiration from the antique toy of the same name. The Marble Run as a form is sprawling, mimicking the quickening descent of a marble on a track, which is stalled for a moment (in the poetic form, Candrilli performs these ‘stalls’ as repetitions of lines at the start of new sections) before descending, at a constantly increasing speed, once again.
And these repetitions as brief stalls before rapid descents echo well Candrilli’s communication through Winter of Worship of a very anticipatory grief—grieving already those to be lost to drug addiction, to climate change, to homophobic and transphobic violence, and to American imperialism. In these moments of grief, time stands still and the poet reaches for that which is to be lost through these broad, institutional and structural violences, before it slips through their fingers. The result is a tenderly felt and beautifully written collection which remembers a lot and wants to record the details of memory before they are lost to time, but which ultimately defers to sensation—the intangible, disoriented, inaccessible aspect of memory, as in the final lines of “Another Poem About Cornfields,” Candrilli’s elegy for a friend lost in the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting: “What else is there to say? I remember / the stars, and the corn, and all of you.”