What to Keep by Carlene M. Gadapee

“Memories are imperfectly stitched together / with a yearning that hurts and cannot be helped,” writes Carlene Gadapee. In these skilled, elegant poems, she threads a way through the quiet history of love and duty, error and redemption. These poems rise into supplication, into sorrow, sometimes into anger; but Gadapee’s voice remains sure and supple, her senses always open to beauty and pain. “Something needs light, needs air,” she writes. Her tender collection reaches, always, toward that essential care.

–Dawn Potter, author of Accidental Hymn

This terrific chapbook catalogues, among other things, those artifacts of love we might not choose yet still carry. Deftly navigating between accrued losses and a tenacious sense of hope, Carlene Gadapee reveals with engaging turns what it is not just to survive, but to continue to live. She writes, “When I think of loss, it looks like empty envelopes.” Yet this small, wonderful book fills those spaces in us with the news of her sharp and perceptive poetry. “Plot the X on your graph, and then / find the why.” What to Keep is a discovery and a reckoning at once.

–BJ Ward, author of Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems 1990-2013

Beginning in a litany of questions, the poems in Carlene Gadapee’s What to Keep sift and weigh, offering no easy answers—instead a gorgeous landscape of memory and experience. Grounded in precise imagery, this is a book of divination by domestic objects—a stool, tissues in a wastebasket, an uncut tomato, opened envelopes—each poem asking what any of it means, how we make sense of a life out of the trappings of home. Be careful, though—plumbing the almost sweetness of loss with such precision and grace, each poem sturdy and braced, these poems will knock you off your gimbals by their ends. There is treasure and terror here. I’m struck by the patience of Gadapee’s craft, her deft control that seems a moment’s thought, but is anything but. What a stunning debut!

–Kerrin McCadden, author of American Wake

Carlene Gadapee’s skillful interweaving of order and disorder reminds us that what and who we choose “to keep” helps us to endure the inevitable chaos and uncertainty of our present, and also our remembered, lives. Even more importantly she demonstrates how, in turn, those choices can create the “quiet life” needed to write from deep in the heart as she does in poem after poem.

–Teresa Carson, author of Time Out of Joint