In the poems there were layers—always a sense of some sort of tunneling beneath the surface of the actual, but what was the actual? If there was a thing beneath a thing, was the original thing full of holes? So then how could I tell you about it, this thing which was an absence with something underneath it? “I found a room / inside another / room,” writes Alexis Almeida in Caetano’s titular poem, and throughout the book we find the speaker tracing and retracing herself—a sort of mirroring, echoes; a looping, spiraling movement occurs again and again in this full-length collection, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in May 2026. “Writing,” Almeida writes, “or this desire for writing”; “I had to turn and be slightly more aware of my turning”; “I wrote a book about pulling, what is a word when pulled from inside another word.” I kept noticing these echoes, these quick repetitive phrases, the thing within the thing, little shadows—like dreams, like translations, like hesitating, like thinking too much about moving and so not really moving.
These slight doublings that occur across the collection give the poems a textural depth, as though they move not across narrative or linear time, but by burrowing down into themselves, seeking neither progression nor conclusion but something else, closer to the root. External objects become things, per Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory”: “The story of objects asserting themselves as things … is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” In Caetano, Almeida presses further, asking what kind of “story” is possible for a subject, for a subject-object relation.
An early poem, “Poem in Which You Become the Hands on My Stomach,” begins:
Today the lake was blue.
Today the lake was blue
without knowing the lake
was a lake. The lake was blue
without knowing, the lake
was blue without knowing
the lake was blue and
blue at its edges
and blue in its waves.
The poem continues in this repetitive, rocking motion, exploring the difference between being and knowing, meaning and saying. If a tree falls and no one hears it; if a tree falls and no one says “if a tree falls,” etc. There is a sense of relentlessness to this poem as it unravels its cyclical lexicon, its reiterative syntax, and we get the sense that the speaker (though somewhat absent of a body or self—unlike most of the other poems of Caetano, there is no “I” here; still, the presence of a subjective perspective is essential and undeniable—the lake does not know it is a lake, but someone certainly does, and says so) is helplessly yoked to her narrative associations, even dragged along by them.
The poem begins with a very simple sentence, but it is quickly pulled apart to reveal both more elaborate physical detail as well as the underlying emotional texture such detail suggests. The lake is not just blue but “blue / at its edges” and “also / … green at its edges,” and there is “yellow sand” and “danger in the waves.” To look closely inevitably narrativizes—and thus strips a thing of its pure thingness and plunges it into the weedy possibilities of language and connotation, where it becomes both bottomless and fictional. Compared to the actuality of the thing itself—the blue lake—the consciousness of the speaker makes the blue lake both more complex, more nuanced, stranger and deeper, via language, and also (and therefore) less itself. A body that “has turned / but is no longer aware of its turning” can just turn, can just be a body turning; if a body is aware of itself, however, “how could a story just / end”? As this poem shows us, the knowledge of a thing can be associative, expansive, multitemporal—bottomless—while the thing itself just is, somewhere beyond language, somewhere real.
In Leo Stein’s The A-B-C of Aesthetics, quoted in “Thing Theory,” he writes: “Things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project.” Almeida seems interested in this moment of encounter, these poems often an attempt to produce not ideas but things, not her own predetermined projections but chance, embodied encounters. In “Things I Have Made a Fiction,” she initially describes writing as a process of finding “an image, or a moment from which I could pull an image,” but soon discovers that writing is both more and less real than the image or experience itself; rather it is “something closer to photographs …, both happening and appearing slowly over time.” The photograph, like the poem, is artifice, inspired by reality but not made up of reality itself—it is also, therefore, its own occurrence. In a later poem in this series, Almeida asks how she could “gently remove [her]self” from the book so “it could be written,” as though she wants less to write the book than to free it from her own projections and ideas.
While Almeida’s poems often trouble narrative explicitly, so too does their form enact this fracturing of sense and temporality. In “Birth Poem,” Almeida begins the page-long prose poem by describing a dream in which she is “biking beside the ocean.” The poem’s dreaminess becomes evident in the second sentence when the speaker notices her “body was falling off,” but it’s the third sentence where things start to really break apart: “I have never watched water completely unfreeze, but lichen is an indefinable mass, so green I feel I can lick the world.” The poem is Ashbery-like in its veering away from the expected, how one clause does not guarantee a clear relationship to the one that follows: “Afraid of salt, I said please to a bucket…” The poem describes the experience of giving birth, which is totally embodied and thus experienced in a languageless dimension, rendering the effort to translate one body to another a futile one, and the poem enacts this wildness, presence and ongoingness, in its shifting subjects and scenes. One minute the speaker is “on a beach in Cape Cod,” and the next she is talking to her analyst. There is no certainty in, nor even any particular significance to each scene; sentence by sentence, the moments go and keep going, a deluge of unordered hours and images like the speaker is slipping through time and space, and in fact, perhaps while delivering new life, she sort of really is. The end of the poem delivers us into the reverberative, half-resting, both/and place of new life where at once everything threatens death and “now the cattails sing.”
But how is it possible to make an encounter into a poem without muddling it with ideas, with subjectivity, with narrative? In the final poem of “Things I Have Made a Fiction,” Almeida describes how her attempt to write about a series of photographs inevitably narrativized them. “‘The back of a car in Kingston’ became ‘I was driving behind the back of Ben’s car in Kingston,’ and ‘a blue jellyfish’ became ‘it was a jellyfish floating in the aquarium tank inside a blue light.’” The story of the objects in the photographs is unavoidable—the images “became” stories, as though they couldn’t help it, as though they took on lives of their own that had nothing to do with the “I” of the poem, as though “something was happening” in the poem that was beyond the writer’s control. In this sense, we begin to see how narrative itself is less an idea intentionally set forth by the writer of the poem, and in fact a mere encounter, a thing in itself which is also more than itself; an inexorable, real thing made up of its relationships with other things, its tunnels and holes.
