Review: Kelly R. Samuels
On All the Time in the World by Kelly R. Samuels
by Tyler Truman Julian
Kelly R. Samuels’ All the Time in the World is a collection that explores cause and effect. For every here, in Samuels’ poems, there is a there. Everything global has a personal connection. Each effect has a cause. It is in these clearly defined connections that Kelly R. Samuels reveals, in striking poems that elevate the mundane to a mythic level, that humanity does not, in fact, have all the time in the world when it comes to responding to climate change.
The poems of All the Time in the World track a speaker who knows she is inextricably connected to the changes happening around her in real time. This speaker is a type of at-home sleuth, uncovering these connections, moving beyond conspiracy to point out how all the threads tacked to her wall converge. In “Geographical Changes,” the speaker highlights the sprawl of it all, putting the pieces together, and declares,
Fragments make more sense, both visible and not.
What has been found—fragments of yet another—
maybe meaning we are more than, that if we delve
we may learn something.
Is there another wall, where I could draw the timeline, see
what I need to see?
I’ll take down some of the art that matters
to me—that painting
there, or that one.
Though I’m growing weary
of understanding, of holding this knowledge in my head.
Samuels’ speaker carries a lot of weight on her shoulders, and the poet carefully unloads it piece by piece. The poems are jagged and fragmented, like the drowning islands and cracking ice shelves they describe, but they come together to create a compelling whole, a narrative tied together by the timeline of the speaker, the individual in our fraught ecological moment.
Samuels clearly sees how the individual is impacted by the global. She writes,
Flotsam and what sinks.
Bits
and pieces. Dregs.
The dregs of this brew,
this day,
these hours.
Toss the cap
there.
Throw the bottle elsewhere.
…
All the lines are now plastic, hauled up
and photographed. Catalogued
as evidence of what is borne on currents,
carried and bobbing— caught
in the throat.
As girls, we slid the plastic
tabs on our ring fingers and said, Darling,
how lovely.
(“Plastic Debris, Borne”)
Environmental degradation is personal in these poems. The speaker is perpetrator as well as victim. She is each one of us. That is the heavy “knowledge” she carries and works out frantically on the walls of her home. “Or so it seems to me,” she reports, in “Here’s Now, Alteration.” And still, life goes on. It’s a troubling existence, but one Samuels knows humanity must reckon with, even if it feels “as if there is no use / in knocking at the closed door, asking for reassurance” (“Here’s Now, Alteration”).
In All the Time in the World, Kelly R. Samuels has written a prescient and timely poetry, elegiac, odic, and lyrical. Samuels’ poems capture the human condition and describe the world around us, changing and confusing as it is. This is an important collection for now. It’ll be an important collection later. It’s a collection for here and for there. Everyone should read All the Time in the World.