I Have Never Wanted Another Life, a book review by Candice Louisa Daquin
I Have Never Wanted Another Life (Riot in Your Throat Press) a poetry collection by Frances Klein
Frances Klein understands people and bad therapists, she understands platitudes and falseness and the horror of infertility. Klein’s book I have Never Wanted Another Life, is a breathing album of such horrors, albeit wrapped in provoking poetry. With the poem In The Bower / The Roses Hang So Heavy, Klein challenges the coy and the oblique poetry-form, by forcing us to consider; what’s wrong with the poet admitting depression? The candor of this rejection of form, using form. How she came up with the idea of writing about what poetry ‘should’ be about, whilst retaining the heart of what depression is. That’s clever.
Crossing metaphorical borders, the poet ruminates about periods of time that nearly destroyed her. Inhabiting this like a tight-rope-walker by taking changes and risks because she believes truth-telling should not be a risk. Fights the war on women with her words, at the battlefront, just Klein and her body show up. Transformed into a historian of her own experiences, her writing resides between laws of what we share, and what is forbidden.
For the way we can find each other across time and space
use the magic of the internet for anything we choose
and we use it to destroy each other (Venmo Request For Therapy Money From The Boy Who Called Me An “8” In His Myspace Hotness Rankings).
When a writer like Klein says; For a long time I’ve been angry. (Resume), do not ignore this as a tantrum or try to quell that rage; do not whatever you do tell her to calm down. She is a generation of women who will eat you alive for suggesting anything akin to containment. To the untrained eye, such writing may appear simply angry, but these poets develop a lexicon and space for modern women, one that is both unapologetic about their rage, and a complicated, equal to anything that came before:
I have frequently been
a complication, a wrench in the spokes. (Resume).
Readers may recall their own miscarriages, reading about Frances Klein’s, with lines like: I will / myself to ignore the smoke alarm blaring in my body, will not be / discouraged by this warning of what might be lost. (Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost). Or the urge friends had to have a baby and their terrible torments of fertility treatment. Klein serves us the hard and unforgiving underbelly of what miscarriage is really like: In the bookstore I wear an oversized pad to collect everything / that was supposed to be your body. (Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost). It is an expose into the banality of the medical industry and its scathing sterile rationale, that creates books like this.
Klein’s prose-poetry relates a woman suspended between now and the punctuated moments of devastation, a style that defines her, but is also inclusive: It’s difficult, / now, to put a finger on the day’s lowest moment: (The Death Of The Dream). We begin to realize the foible and beauty of living with so much fantasy attached to experiences, or how much fantasy the other person attaches to you; especially when that fantasy is ripped open and a miscarriage, something visceral, reminds us we are corporal and subject.
Additionally, Klein refers to the modern-living dilemma; stuck with social media, alienated by technology, buying into toxic-positivity, only to find it lacking. The real lived experience of women in 2025; their secrets, the behind-the-scenes confessions when they’re not on Facebook smiling. The omnipresent feeling of being targeted, by media, technology, other people, predators and our impossible response to it all:
And are you happy? Of course not.
And are you safe? Of course not,
no one promised any of those things
to anyone in life. All you can do
is harden the target. (Targeted)
Klein’s writing leaves you rapt with its insight and self-immolation, capturing the feeling of life under the tyranny of pregnancy and miscarriage. Described evocatively throughout: (I have no idea how to be kind to myself. / Living / seems unkind beyond belief.) (They Tell Me I’m Gonna Be A Heartbreaker One Day). Poetic narrative builds into a piece of music from searching reflections and plummeting realities. Klein’s writing is precise,-flinty and dreamlike at the same time. Sorrow rises off the pages of this collection like a vapor. We inhale and seek again, philosophical wrapping of words:
Even the words we spend
with no thought for the cost
were once something else. (Origin Stories)
Part of the pain of our moments are connected to the shift in our bodies from wholeness to loss. I loathe the smug reader who dismisses collections such as these, as ‘grief’ poems, because they cannot be relegated to a genre, or summation. You do not know, those of you who claim to know. You probably don’t even really believe you know. Leave this collection to those who cherish the heartache of real life and its unbearable beauties. Where poets alone, are able to obsess us with their savage approximation of being.
I didn’t know then
about the griefs no grave can hold. (Makeup Tutorial).
Candice Louisa Daquin is Associate Editor with Life & Legends, Managing Editor for Lit Fox Books (Austin, TX), Reviews Editor for Austin Poetry Review, and Poetry Editor with Writers Resist and Parcham. Daquin is also Consultant Editor for Raw Earth Ink and co-judge of The Northwind Writing Award. www.candicelouisadaquin.com
