Cassie Donish
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The Year of the Femme
Cassie Donish’s poems do several kinds of work—at first they ask the big questions, like whether the Gordian Knot or Mobius Strip of gender can ever be set free from its binds of paradox, or where precisely does the crux of the sex/gender question live in us? The answers haven’t landed, and the poet allows the unknown to take up space... Donish sends their heartbroken and passionate voice into the world and the world catches it. Soon that voice is wreathed, garlanded, full of pollen and rain and clover and indigo—everything further broken, messy, lovely, loving, wild, and utterly itself, and it’s in that state that this voice, lush yet precise, is then thrown to us, the reader sighing with pleasure and pathos. A bold and redemptive truth is found here, not reliant on answers for its power and meaning. —Brenda Shaughnessy
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