Marilyn Kallet served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate, June 27, 2018-June 2020. Even When We Sleep is her 19th book publication. Other poetry volumes include How Our Bodies Learned, The Love That Moves Me and Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press. She translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems and Benjamin Péret’s The Big Game. Kallet is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee. Since 2009, she has mentored poetry groups for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France; this group will resume in Spring, 2022. Kallet’s poems have appeared in Plume, New Letters, Potomac Review and American Diversity Report, among others.
This review is not to say that Marilyn Kallet is not wonderfully talented. I just was not a fan of this volume. So many of these poems felt very personal or like poems she had to write for herself, and there’s a place for that, I just don’t think it endures time. Quite a few pantoums here, which was fun but random. Honestly, it was the dated double space after the period that got me from the beginning :/
Poems I enjoyed: “Keys to the Door of Endings” “December Journal” “Redbird” “Before the Discovery of the Mind”
One of my favorite Marilyn Kallet books. "The beginning of life in the body," she writes post-sex. Mmm-hmmm...a sensual, sexual, musical, delicious book.