What You Have Become by Kit Sibert

Kit Sibert’s exquisite distillations in What You Have Become are heartbreakingly human. With her painter’s eye, the poet captures the details of a vibrant world. As the poems move into places where “the veil between the dead and the living” is thin, we hold our breath and then we breathe, admiring and trusting completely this voice that urges: “Let death in its breathlessness be/ the breathtaking mystery.”

–Karen McPherson, author of Sketching Elise

The poems Kit Sibert offers are keen and bear a tart bliss. What You Have Become is a summons, a summons to the presence of an absence. In deft brushstrokes we are treated to relics built of items both honorific and mundane, a wooden statue of St. Francis resting against “the Chips Ahoy box.” We undergo life’s “insinuating, insistent” seductions and are left like the poet “wet, with the messy/business . . .” This cycle of short poems balances perfectly between a lover’s remembrance and immersion, reminding readers that any world well-loved is “animated/by the naming of things.” Sibert dares us to greet each odd and exquisite element, to attach—like her beloved—our own mindful nametags.

–Tim Whitsel, author of We Say Ourselves

I love these poems. Each feels like a little gift and carries the surprising magic of a dream or a child’s drawing. In their depiction of loss and of life reinventing itself, these poems are completely unpretentious. They offer ordinary things in ordinary words: Chips Ahoy, stickers on a vacuum cleaner, hash browns—and they let these things stay ordinary even as “the veil between the living and the dead” grows thinner. Again and again we see how the everyday and the mystical are simultaneous. Presences and absences hover together. Nothing disappears completely, and the world of these poems is full of sorrow, and humor, memories, and new creative energy. “Pick up the brush, dip it into an unknown color,” commands one poem. Kit Sibert does. Among the vivid yellows and reds and blues and oranges of her images, that unknown color floats. I can feel it: “an evanescent anchor/The room that flies open” – what loss has become.

–Kelly Terwilliger, author of A Glimpse of Oranges

These are poems of loss and renewal, of a poet’s humble and humorous search for grace. In What You Have Become, Kit Sibert manages to “begin the act / of losing it to gain it.” This sensuous, sorrowful, and soulful journey through grief is utterly human, undertaken with an open heart, vulnerable to its core.

–Cecelia Hagen, author of Entering

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]