The Naomi Letters
Rachel Mennies
Reviewed by Dylan Hopper
“Everything inside of me has changed, and everything outside of me / has changed,” Rachel Mennies’ speaker writes to the woman she loves, Naomi, in the final poem of The Naomi Letters. Through its form of epistolary narrative, this collection unifies exteriority and interiority, the light of the sun and the glow of the bedside lamp. Allowing her reader to inhabit a space traditionally reserved for the sender and recipient, Mennies places the private, domestic sphere of letter writing in a public space, casting Mennies as the sender and her readers as the recipients. Like Naomi, the reader is privy to the speaker’s meditations on vital aspects of her identity—her bisexuality, her Jewish upbringing and the impact of intergenerational trauma, and her mental illness.
Separated into four seasons, the letters are all dated, save for the unsent drafts. The chronology of the epistolaries illustrates distance, the spatial and temporal depth between the speaker and Naomi, between the speaker’s past and present, between the speaker’s body and psyche. The speaker distinguishes and blends these points of separation to examine the influence of love and grief in the configuration of her identity, calling upon familial, cultural, and personal history and invoking the work of poets like Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. The intertextuality woven throughout her letters reflects the desire to reconcile those distances inside and outside of self through poetry. In an unsent draft, the speaker writes, “It is false, Naomi, this separation.” Reckoning with identity, Mennies’ epistolaries provide the space for the speaker’s language to transform knowledge into understanding, thus achieving revelation.