What you say, though, about reckoning, about whether someone’s time on earth mattered, that’s what drove me to include his story. I hadn’t wanted to include my nuclear family in this way-partially because those of us who lose people to addiction are habituated to keeping quiet about it. And when we lost him, I recognized that his life was part and parcel of that quest for home-for family-and another way families break. It was squarely about home, and about trying to recapture ideas of home I knew I had lost, generationally and through divorce. Just like when we were kids and he was my little brother trashing something I had done. The funny thing is that I did not set out to write a collection of poems centered on my brother-and I remember, after he died, and after I had written the balance of the poems about him, feeling that head-shaking, half-laughing sibling moment where I thought, he wrecked my shit again. Among all my regrets is how long it took me to understand that-very much too late. Addicts perform behaviors that are so frustrating and harmful, but they do so because they have a disease.
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I don’t think our society will do the work it needs to do to understand addiction as an illness until we remove shame from the equation. I didn’t want his death to merely be a senseless loss, and I hoped that by telling about it, that people in my family’s shoes might feel less alone, might feel less shame. What weighed on me after we lost him, after years of worrying that I would long outlive him, after writing poems about him dying long before he died (“When My Brother Dies” was written about ten years before he died), was how secret these losses often are. So, yes, I feel I am betraying my brother and his memory by writing about his life, but his life is also mine. I think we should find the line-the one we should not cross-in being sure the story is somehow meaningfully ours to tell. I always think of poets as having a kinship with journalists-if a journalist can’t ethically drive past a car crash without reporting on it, so, too, with the poet. Subject matter is always dangerous for poets, or almost always, as what we are doing, if we are doing our work, is invading intimacies. It’s both the reckoning work poets regularly do, but it’s also a betrayal to write about the lives of others. I think the work poets do in telling other people’s stories is decidedly both reckoning and betrayal. What do you feel is your responsibility as a writer in revealing and showing the lives and deaths of others? Is there a line where we should not cross or should worry about what right we even have to tell these stories? Is it a reckoning of someone’s life, that their moment on earth mattered or is it possibly a betrayal to put these stories on display? Could it be both? KM Poets and writers often unearth these stories of their lives and the lives of those they know. This book is wonderfully crafted in terms of poetics but it also dives deep into some hard reality and family history. I was fortunate enough to ask the poet some questions about her powerful collection to learn a bit about how it happened. Auden wrote that poetry “makes nothing happen” but can be a “way of happening” and this collection is the proof and possibility of that way. In verse that continuously surprises, delights, and even guts the reader, American Wakehaunts as it heartens and speaks the raw truth of this human existence. McCadden journeys through what home means in the shadow of her adopted brother’s death from drug addiction, through the landscapes of Ireland searching for her own genetic and cultural home, through her struggle to find home in her own mind and body as a mother, wife, lover, and daughter. Kerrin McCadden’s American Wake throws its gaze on the harrowing reality of homegoing-to homes broken, to homes dreamed for, to homes wished against, to homes that may only exist in some lyric periphery.
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An Interview with Kerrin McCadden, by Matt Miller