“That Open Heart”: Carlene Gadapee's What to Keep reviewed by Andria Williams
What to Keep
Carlene Gadapee
Finishing Line Press, 2025
Should love be practical, or should it blow the budget," is perhaps my favorite line from Carlene Gadapee's poetry chapbook, What to Keep. This line, with its casually explosive language, stands out in a book that otherwise uses quietness as a form of strength.
Most of the moments in What to keep are domestic, channeled through the visual, in that riveting way children observe parents, grandparents, no detail missed even before the meaning becomes clear. Memories emerge through objects — bookcases, a crayon box, a pile of silver Hershey's kisses wrappers in the wastebin — and through things left unsaid, as when the narrator's elderly father, "always so good with words," is rendered unable to speak.
But between these silences and within these objects, there is a simmering, shimmering, gathering power, the knowledge that loss, or resentment, or love, could detonate at any moment and blow the whole human budget. On topics from the pandemic to a trailer fire, to how the soul might leave the body, Gadapee acknowledges the tenuousness of our lives. "Some separations begin long before death," she writes, warning us of the fault lines we are all standing on. That gathering pressure and sudden eruption is echoed in "That Friday," which takes Matthew's Biblical description of the spectacular cracking-open of tombs, saints rising into the sky, after the Crucifixion, and gives it to a woman drawing water from a well.
Gadapee's Catholic upbringing adds gravitas and a mystical thoughtfulness to the handful of poems dealing with religion. She embraces the miraculous but maintains a watchful caution. Recalling a familiar portrait of a blond Christ, she can tell how she is supposed to see Him, how other people want her to see Him, while her childhood mind begins to feel a tremor of doubt that this might not be Him at all. If even Christ can't control how He is depicted, then how is anyone correctly interpreted?
She especially is captivated by his
"...burning heart
looking like it might burst. That open heart
surrounded by flames scared me.
I wonder aloud: what do you see in me?
There's a silence,
a long pause. My own burning heart —
is it sacred too?"
A poet's heart is always in danger. There is always risk. Rilke wrote, "Don't plant me in your heart, for I would grow too fast." But our hearts were tilled from the start. Here's Gadapee's "Even if This is the End Times, I Still":
"I demand moments of beauty...
...I want to wake one morning, breathe deeply,
and face the day with nothing on my mind except
filling spaces between moments with flowers,
with laughter, with wonder, with you."
In What to Keep, that simmering, shimmering dangerous thing, that longing, that fear, ends up being the love we feel for other people, the core that could go critical. Excellent poet that she is, Gadapee doesn't shy from this risk.
And for the record, I think it should blow the budget.
***
About Carlene Gadapee: A poet-teacher both by nature and by trade, her poetry and critical reviews have been featured in a wide range of publications, including English Journal, Waterwheel Review, Smoky Quartz, and more. She lives in northern New Hampshire.
Andria Williams is the author of the novels The Longest Night and The Waiting World. She is founder of the Military Spouse Book Review and was former editor-in-chief of The Wrath Bearing Tree literary journal, which she is proud to note — in its over ten-year tradition of supporting service members, military families, and anyone affected by war or violence — just published, independently, an interview and excerpt from Karie Fugett.