Book Review: Another Place Altogether by Candice M. Kelsey
There is a moment in Another Place Altogether where personal memory and political reality collide so quietly that it almost goes unnoticed. The speaker turns to her daughter, celebrating her twenty-first birthday, while wars unfold elsewhere, and love becomes both obvious and unbearable. The poem does not shout; it insists. This tension — between intimacy and history, between lyric tenderness and structural violence — is the emotional engine of Candice M. Kelsey’s collection.
Kelsey writes out of inheritance: of mothers and daughters, of bodies shaped by shame, of families that transmit wounds as casually as language. Again and again, her poems return to the idea that girlhood is not merely lived but engineered — by fathers, by culture, by religion, by capitalism. In poems like “Leaving a Legacy” and “What She Learns,” the female body becomes a site where private trauma and social ideology converge, revealing how deeply patriarchy embeds itself in domestic life. These poems are at their strongest when they resist simplification, when rage is allowed to coexist with grief, irony, and unexpected tenderness.
Formally, Another Place Altogether is ambitious. Kelsey moves across sonnets, centos, golden shovels, narrative poems, and hybrid forms with visible confidence. She is attentive to craft and lineage, invoking poets from Louise Erdrich to Ocean Vuong, from Sharon Olds to Eavan Boland. At times, this intertextuality feels generative: language becomes a shared archive, a way of situating personal pain within collective histories.
What distinguishes Kelsey’s work from much contemporary confessional poetry is her insistence that the personal is never merely personal. Capitalism, war, purity culture, Trump, motherhood, mental health — these are not backdrops but forces that shape the lyric voice itself. In a poem whose title likens poetic failure to capitalism’s failure of children, Kelsey gestures toward a broader critique: that language, like systems, can betray those it claims to serve. Yet the collection also reveals the limits of this approach. At times, political commentary leans toward explanation rather than implication, toward statement rather than image. The poems are most powerful when they trust metaphor instead of argument.
Still, Another Place Altogether is not a safe book. It is messy, angry, vulnerable, and intellectually alert. It refuses the polished neutrality that dominates much literary publishing. Kelsey is not interested in aesthetic distance; she writes from inside the wound, but she also questions it. Her best poems suggest that survival is not heroic but ongoing, unstable, and ethically complicated.
In the end, Another Place Altogether for me, is about attempting to speak, to remember, to reparent oneself, to locate meaning in a world that repeatedly fractures it. And in a literary culture that often rewards safety over risk, that refusal is itself a form of resistance.
Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a bi-coastal writer and educator. Her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she is the author of eight books, including Another Place Altogether (Kelsay Books, 2025). Her writing has appeared in Bust, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poet Lore, SWWIM, and numerous literary journals. She is a reader for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal and recently served as an AWP Poetry Mentor.