Solve for Desire: Poems

by Caitlin Bailey

Overview

Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award

A debut collection of poems that finds fertile ground in the unknown degree of intimacy, the mysterious and intense relationship, between siblings Georg and Grete Trakl.

Georg Trakl is one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. Less is known about his sister, Grete: also gifted, also addicted to drugs, and dead by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. But in Solve for Desire—selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Caitlin Bailey summons Grete from the shadows. At once sensual and acidic, obsessive and bereft, the Grete of these poems is a fairy-tale sister leaving “missives dropped around the city, crumbs / for your ghost.”

Can one person be addicted to another? Can two souls be twinned, and where does that leave the physical? How do we solve for desire when the object we adore disappears—and how does the poet solve and resolve the past, its wounds and its absences? “Each time I write your name,” Bailey writes, “a key / turns somewhere in a lock.” Like the “perfect red burst” of poppies and of blood, these poems are a blooming, keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314994
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Caitlin Bailey has published poems in Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Hamline University and lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Read an Excerpt

The Heart Is to a Pleasant Thing

Compare the heart to any pleasant thing.
Compare an apple to a snake.
Failed experiments we are bound to apply endlessly.
Or ignore entirely.
In any case, we are rarely seated simply.
Here is the tool I currently find useful.
Snake’s middle, or some callous bulge in the peel.
I intended to love only what was given.
It’s difficult to find the wound.
To walk into a field and obscure anything.
To leave each flower picked clean.
Historically, the last petal becomes your fortune.
He loves me not.
Everything is made equal by darkness.
Let’s see how the trees can rebound.
Let’s see how I can make you mine.

***

The Pond

Small places burst with love for you. My hand is an oar.
An eardrum expanding. A ribbon pulled across the wrist.
You hear bells ringing in another country, a sound that echoes only in your head. Let me tell you how the bells began to colonize even me. Let me tell you about the betrayal of my organs. For the first time I knew why you wanted out of this world. The way home was through your undoing.
For days you circled the pond, such a careful plotting.
I could only watch, finger the purple valance. And later,
I confess: I saw you walk into the pond, straight down and into it, that terrible blue mouth. Who was I to prevent your sinking, to call out, when nothing in this world deserved you? Your floating hat gives you up, the housekeeper rushing to pull you back. My reckless emissary, my drowning fox—
you come back to me muted and heavy.

***

How We Prepared for War

It was necessary to become cold. To forget the lives we’d dreamed of. The days were taut and full of smoke.
Our pockets were mostly empty. We practiced crawling through progressively smaller holes. Made quick work of a tangled bandage. You served me poisoned, oily fish until my mouth became a bell that only you could hear.
I came to crave the lovely pain—my strange want—
and ate the fish with gusto. Every day prepared us for the next explosion. I lived as though you moved the earth, its axis stilled when you entered a room.
The slow ravage of my gut surprised no one. When the war began
I would stand stupid and stunned, unconvinced the world could throttle on beyond our pause, our meticulous training.

***

Some Elaborate

Brother, you began to leave me early,
chose to offer yourself to the ground beneath horses and trains, refused to focus on my face, this world a water too murky to cleanly navigate

You leave me every day in small ways,
and I imagine your organs must be eroding,
your skin the only shoreline I want to visit,
and time a limit refused again and again

And I am bursting, my fist a hot planet,
my pelvis a meadow, and I will be the bell,
a war ending, our hearts some elaborate pulley system, a line long enough to stretch across countries

I am hostage to your absence,
filling a bucket, even the most familiar street a wilderness I don’t recognize,
a waterline I keep expecting will change

Table of Contents

Contents

I.
Whoever Drinks from Me
Lost Letter
Pigeons
Church, Hipbone
This Is the House
Poem about Desire
The Heart Is to a Pleasant Thing
Detonate
Incantare
Poem about Desire
Right Light
The Field That Resists Naming
The Pond
All You Can Do Is Imagine the Leaving
False Narrative
How We Prepared for War
In the Company of a Blue Apparatus

II.
This Is a Life
Definition Of
The Trick Is Small
Hull
Absence Anatomy
Grete Writes to Georg at War
Where We Are Both Well
Nocturne
On Never Marrying Him
Little Pieces
Dream II
Poem about Desire
Some Elaborate
Given the Depth
Somewhere a Key

III.
Spin
Grete Asks the Hard Question
Animus
Keening
Poppies
Men I Could Have Loved
Litany for G
Umwelt
Wild Boat

IV.
Love Lustrum
On the One-Year Anniversary of Your Death
To Coax a Wound
Poem about Desire
Sanatorium
Burden and Roar
Tethered
Paradise
Riot
Unfetter
What Comes After
The Poem about Birds I Can’t Write
To G, after the Party
Living Without

Editorial Reviews

01/01/2018
Bailey takes a sobering look at desire, addiction, loss, and absence in this debut collection of short, lyric poems that are by turns lush and understated, lofty and plainspoken. The work revolves around the intense and ambiguous story of addiction and desire in the lives of turn-of-the-20th-century Austrian siblings and artists Georg and Grete Trakl, poet and painter, respectively. “I remember the first time, your hand cupped/ over the glass and over mine, O charging desire,” Bailey writes, as Grete, in the time between Georg’s death by cocaine overdose and her own suicide: “I knew nothing of loss.” Bailey moves between direct (“Word of your death comes on a Sunday/... The city has begun to unravel into dark filaments,/ your name a rope drawn taut”) and loaded (“Here is the tool I currently find useful./ Snake’s middle, or some callous bulge in the peel”) language, in keeping with the mystery surrounding Georg and Grete’s relationship—as siblings, as matchmakers, and, possibly, as illicit lovers. She performs a kind of feminist resuscitation of the lesser-known Grete, focusing on small moments of quiet, grief, lust, and memory, and fleshing out a story that is still disputed. While Bailey enriches her collection through history, in a sense the Trakls’ story could be that of any close pair separated by death. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Solve for Desire

“The speaker of Solve for Desire inserts herself into a sad historical equation—Georg and Grete Trakl’s tragic story of trauma, addiction, and suicide—and discovers, through the passage of grief into wonder, an endlessly variable self. ‘Perhaps I was a magpie, a songbird. / Perhaps all burden and roar.’ Is this Grete speaking from the grave, or is it anyone who’s lost a brother, or struggled with dependence, or made music from a broken heart’s ‘perfect red burst’? Solve for Desire is the work of a poet who sings, boldly, across the distances between us. ‘I am not afraid of any edge.’”—Srikanth Reddy

“Bailey often delivers short poems like flashes; those can be held in your palm, however mysterious. . . . Her words rest in that curious space between abstraction and touch, so this is a book to place upon one’s soul.”—The Millions

"Bailey takes a sobering look at desire, addiction, loss, and absence in this debut collection of short, lyric poems that are by turns lush and understated, lofty and plainspoken. The work revolves around the intense and ambiguous story of addiction and desire in the lives of turn-of-the-20th-century Austrian siblings and artists Georg and Grete Trakl, poet and painter . . . She performs a kind of feminist resuscitation of the lesser-known Grete, focusing on small moments of quiet, grief, lust, and memory, and fleshing out a story that is still disputed."—Publishers Weekly

"This precarious, satisfyingly disjointed debut collection of poetry captures the spirit of the [Trakl] siblings. . . . Bailey's brilliantine lyrics shine brightest when the siblings' characters are wrought in full relief."—Booklist

“In these imagined letters of musical prodigy Grete Trakl to her brother, Austrian poet Georg Trakl, Caitlin Bailey juxtaposes anguished desire with ravishing grief, a charged inner life with the outer world of the early twentieth century. Bailey’s imagination and lyricism are astonishing: ‘What I would give to be the poppy or else / the black horse, veins laid out like a map / you’d just unfolded . . . The space between our bodies a constellation/ they haven’t named yet.’ She sings in a voice of dark time, part solace, part warning perhaps: ‘It was necessary to become cold. To forget the lives / we’d dreamed of. The days were taut and full of smoke. / Our pockets were mostly empty. We practiced crawling / through progressively smaller holes . . . Every day prepared us / for the next explosion.’”—Patricia Kirkpatrick

“One of poetry’s most glorious challenges since its very beginnings—think Sappho—has been to try to ‘solve for desire.’ Caitlin Bailey’s book confronts this sacred task both head on and obliquely. These poems are about and to all of us: the desperation and the glory of desire are both fully present, as well as its underlying mystery. This is a beautiful and important book, absolutely original and deeply courageous.”—Jim Moore

"Caitlin Bailey pierces the surface of our daily world to expose the real real world of private desire and restraint, in writing that is incantatory and archetypal, at times recalling the Psalms of lament—ancient, strange, and true. These poems make clear that desire heightens perception as much as any drug. 'I wonder / what it would have felt like to have a choice, to choose love, / to hold anything with both hands. It’s taken me this long / to say I want I want I want,' Bailey writes. All of us have felt some form of impossible wanting, 'a tantrum made palatable / only by its alternative,' but few poets have conveyed the experience as hauntingly. I want to read this book over and over. Caitlin Bailey is a new talent and an old soul."—Katrina Vandenberg

"In Solve for Desire, Caitlin Bailey has constructed a world the size of a room | the size of a dream. There, she tries obsessively in image and language to work out the was and might-have-been of the pianist Grete Trakl and her brother Georg. The poems are tethered and crowded and sometimes as uncomfortable as a mouth with too many teeth. Do you remember going to a matinee at a movie theater as a child? It is that kind of hidden room | hidden dream. On exiting, I looked at the world through its scrim."—Éireann Lorsung

“In Solve for Desire, Caitlin Bailey attends to the lives of the German modernist poet Georg Trakl and his sister, Grete, with tremendous insight, sympathy, and skill. But this book does something more: Bailey’s gift for balancing lyric intensity with narrative inquiry reveals a major new talent.”—Peter Campion

From the Publisher