True Mistakes

by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize



In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.


As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.” “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.


Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2025

Reviews

[Megan Pinto]

These poems unfold in such surprising and beautiful ways. I want to spend all my time inside the world of this book. A stunning debut.

[Ena]

A collection of poems about death. She, Lena Moses-Schmitt, is here to know, and certainly, writing any collection of poems is praiseworthy, as it requires revealing oneself beyond what is comfortable.
However, these poems lack a grounded sense of place from which the feelings that she has undoubtably experienced (grief, longing, sadness) can be expressed. She possesses the type of unfocused sentimentality that turns the thoughts into images, but those images do not encompass the intent behind the words. The poems are long, to their detriment, and do not represent the truth that I see in the here and there in lines which do express her emotions and would have been better left alone to represent her poem. The filler is as if she went through a poetic handbook and plucked a concept to inject into a given line and round out the work. These piecewise attempts at writing remind me of graduate school efforts. The poems lack an essential truth of the moment which brought forth the initial emotion. Though they wish to portray that initial emotion, they do not. The truth of her life is obliquely stated, and to find it, you must sift through the poetic concepts that cobble together each poem. The collection would have been greatly helped by restricting the words allowed and focusing on concrete images as a base for the juxtaposition between the real and the emotion.

[Elena Macdonald]

this was a treat

[Leigh Lucas]

Gorgeous book of poems that explores inner life, God, grief, art making, perceiving, and being perceived.

So many great poems and my favorite (today) is an elegy from which the titles collection comes:

Figure Drawing: Elegy

If I draw you it must be a gift
from my memory as you are

more memory now than woman

your upkeep belongs to the sweep
a thought makes

and the hand its translator

the paper the ear receiving the thought
of your body

if I can still call it yours

but of course it is your mind
I miss where lines can't reach

though I could try to sketch
from a medical textbook the formulation of cells

multiplying fueling
the wildfire in your brain

even then

that wasn't you
but your illness

let's draw a line between the two

let's pretend
illness has nothing to do with the body

& the body nothing to do with the self

better yet pretend
you're still here that's all

drawing is pretending

my mind is more real than reality

I draw you so I can talk
to you without language

in the same way I've gathered all the paper
where you had placed your hand-

writing a map of how your mind moved

through space maybe
the best correspondence happens
in silence

that place where you now live

between two shapes I recreate here your head
there your neck

from my mind which spoke

to my hand which spoke to the pencil
which spoke to the paper

I fear this is too many steps
to get right

this perpetual conversation
the body trips through itself

and now I see I've copied

the slope of your chin wrong
not quite yours I've made

you wear another person's jaw
an accidental operation

but I don't want to redo any parts of you
even the mistakes

which we're taught are human

but more than that I think

true mistakes are what the body makes.

It didn't know what it was doing
when it erased you.