Letters to My Dead Name by Richelle Lee Slota

Letters to My Dead Name by Richelle Lee Slota is an easy book to love. It’s honest, dynamic, and vulnerable. It held my #TodaysPoem on social media twice, once at Instagram and once at Bluesky. Letters to My Dead Name at 68 pages feels longer in a good sense. A lot of ground and mood are covered. It’s storytelling but it doesn’t feel like it should be called short stories. Some poems are in forms such as villanelle or constrained by meter, such as hendecasyllable lines, or in monorhyme but most are not. Unlike some collections with a flat controlled tone these poems are vibrant with a sense of personality and person rather than stuck inside a narrow idea of poem-voice. That is not to suggest it isn’t poetic. There are some lines that sung, which you will have to discover for yourself. No spoilers.

The collection is divided into two sections: “private letters” and “public letters.” The former are reflections with self, to fear, to mother, to neighbour and to others, while the second section is social and public life, more occasion poems. It’s an autobiography in poetry from a career soldier, born to parents of 5 and gradually coming into oneself with time.

Richelle performed on stage within the military, for example in 1967 when the battalion “marched in formation/to the gym and packed the stands for Anton Chekhov’s/The Marriage Proposal.”The poet’s familiarity with performance and with providing payoff for audience is evident from the start (p. 2)

Don’t solve me.
Deadnaming me won’t work.

If the horse is dead, painting
its toenails won’t revive it to life.

Self-defining as female from age 5 Lee Slota’s environment was too hostile and dangerous for decades to transition. Written on the other side 3 ex-wives the poems puzzle through reconstructions flash points of coming into self. The journey includes the somber reminder of truth of being bullied (p. 9), “you don’t have to act on threats for threats to work.”

How to blend is particular to gender dysphoria, but has a universality to it as well. Heart-rending are the lines in “How Do you be a Boy?” (p. 12)

I take scissors to my eyelashes.
How do you be a boy?

Also hitting home was “trauma” for everyone who’s been there. (p. 24)

You deal with it.
You get over it.
You move on.
It comes back

The poems aren’t in lieu of therapy but also play. See the wink of wit and the upside of Covid shelter-in-place orders in joy of “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Plague.” (p 29)

to finally feel alone, live female,
shake off the last wife.

This second section of poetry is loud and proud, defiant, and playful like p. 50 exploring “What if you Seven Dwarfs seven genders morphs?”

And so far as the occasion poems I mentioned, “I Am Not Invisible.” (p. 41) I wish this were out of date instead of even more relevant. Hard time in the US to hold fast under fire. Here in part,

On 22 January 2019, the Supreme Court
moves to erase me. That morning I look in
the mirror. I am not yet invisible!
I do my hair, makeup, put on my best dress.
Is this dress mightier than the sword?

Mightier than Trump purging us
transgenders from the military, or
allowing health care workers
for reasons religious to refuse to care for us?

It is an ultimately uplifting and engaging book. There is risk in sharing your story but greater risk sometimes in hiding. In the latter, you miss the exhilaration of self-acceptance and being seen. A beautiful collection.

On July 17, 1955, Richelle Lee Slota was one of 200 third Graders selected to open Disneyland by running across the drawbridge into Fantasyland. She’s been running into Fantasyland ever since. Richelle (formerly known as Richard) is the author of the forth coming poetry collection, Letters to My Dead Name, the poetry chapbook, Famous Michael, the novel, Stray Son, and the non-fiction book, Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories from Nigeria. Her short play, We All Walk In Shoes Too Small, was produced at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. The long poem, Famous Michael, was staged by Solano Repertory Company in northern California as a play. She has earned BA’s in Psychology and Theatre Arts and a MA in Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Caveat Lector, Quercus, Rogue Agent, Pratik, One Act, Blue Buildings, engine(idling, Yellow Mama, and Yellow Silk. She lives in San Francisco. She is a Meter Mentor to women learning meter on Annie Finch’s online community, Poetry Witchery Community. She has three grown children. She is an Army vet.

Publisher: Blue Cedar Press (January 15, 2025)
Paperback: 9″ x 6″
ISBN: 9781958728314

Pearl Pirie

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Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet