everything saved will be last

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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.