everything saved will be last

by Isaac Pickell

everything saved will be last, the debut poetry chapbook from Isaac Pickell, considers the body and the environments that hold it while navigating the personal, generational, and societal consequences of passing as white. Pickell’s work pursues small moments of self, embodied memory, and politics that bleed away from the skin, toward whatever can be accessed as home, onto what remains there.

Melodic and often unsettling, this collection allows nothing passive about passing or in choosing to refuse it; Pickell’s speakers do not shy away from the specter of blackface fantasies, of not always recognizing ourselves in the stories we tell. In “The future was better before,” the speaker questions the boundaries and permeations of identity and selfhood: “When are we gonna get tired / becoming genre and cower // into the helpless terror / of being just one person // [ All my life, I’ve wanted skin / like that ].”

Part reflection and part indictment, the meditations in these pages take aim at the long story of racial capitalism and its contemporary keepers. everything saved will be last asks the questions we should all still be asking and invites sometimes uncomfortable answers. These are poems that require sinking into, poems that will stay with the reader long after the last page.

Genres: Poetry

44 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2021

About the author

Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet & PhD student in Detroit, where he teaches and studies the borderlands of black literature. He is author of the chapbook everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out, a full-length collection forthcoming from Black Ocean Press. Isaac’s taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been a fan of Pickell’s work for a while now, and this chap is another incredible achievement. Pickell skillfully plays with white/black/blank space and the unsaid/presaid/bracketed — read the text 3 times and get 3 different layers.

This is a rough dance with memory. It sticks like seaweed. It pulls into places that can be poemed and not said.

[Gregory Ashe · Rating 5 out of 5]

powerful well-crafted poetry.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Problems of the body. Problems of the world. Pickell’s poems hover between history, confession, fractured revelation. Always looking for definition, reinterpretation—recognizing it is the imagined who render reality.

Brutal, risky, and singular, Pickell has invented a new taxonomy to decipher the separation between selves.

[Tiyasha Chaudhury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new voice.

[Thea Swanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich, layered poems that usually keep us in our heads and hover above melancholy despite the loss that pervades the pages.