Kenzie Allen’s poetry collection Cloud Missives is a brilliant debut.
Shelf Awareness wrote of the book:
“Incredible. . . . evocative. . . . Kenzie Allen’s first volume of
poetry is a stunning consideration of constructing identity, finding
love, and living life.”
In her own words, here is Kenzie Allen’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Cloud Missives:
Cloud Missives is itself a compilation, a coin jar of a book containing poems written over the course of more than a decade and across many different concepts. But across the book as a whole, a story emerges, as the speaker seeks out a means of recovery following a series of violences both personal and colonial. Along the way, pop culture figures like Tiger Lily and Indiana Jones, and fairy tale figures like the evil queen and the ghost of the British Empire, act as foils to the speaker’s reconstruction of identity, kinship, and memory.
In creating this playlist, I considered similar suggestions of narrative arc, mirroring the progression of Cloud Missives across its four sections—from uncovering the bones in “Pathology,” to recovering the identity and the self in “Manifest,” and from reclaiming power in “Letters I Don’t Send,” to celebrating the powerful impacts of adoration in the final section of “Love Songs”—all within which there might be an overall redemption story of the book’s speaker.
It’s also a time capsule. Some of the songs figured prominently in the historical periods that led to the poems, while others are newer tunes that hearken back to those earlier moments or carry their missives onward into the future. Sometimes, we’re looking back on what happened right before entering the memory. Sometimes, we’re imagining further possibilities even as we lay our past to rest.
Highasakite, “Love Him Anyway”
I must have listened to this song every day for a year—particularly the year I was finally letting go of the aftereffects of the violent relationship from which much of Cloud Missives seeks to recover, the shame and guilt that had me saying, “why did I let it go on that way?”
“Didn’t you, didn’t you,
Didn’t you know better?”
I did! But maybe it mattered at the time, too, to hold on to the part of myself, however vulnerable, that wanted so deeply to love and be loved. And if you want to shake off a bad memory, maybe there’s some kind of healing to be found in leaning into the ache.
Imogen Heap, “The Moment I Said It”
This is the song that comes closest to the wrenching, frightening, heart-stopping experiences that led to the “Pathology” section, the tension and threat I lived through and which confused my senses for so long afterward. It’s interesting that I’d been listening to this album on repeat the year before everything started going to hell, not knowing how I’d end up saying the same things in real life.
“Just put down the car keys,
Or somebody’s gonna get hurt”
I stopped listening to this song for years after that, and I still flinch to hear it. But again, sometimes that memory and those emotions are important to explore, so you can find your way back from them.
SMASH Cast, “Rewrite This Story”
Forgive me—I’m a SMASH fan. But this track resonates on a historical and conceptual level, too. In the year I lived in New York, down the street from an old piano factory turned upscale apartment complex, my life also seemed like a play within a play, but instead of a musical it was a horror show. I began to ask,
“Someone tell me when
I can start again and
Rewrite this story”
So much of Cloud Missives asks if reinvention might be possible in the misty, amorphous spaces between rain drops and pressure systems. How do we rewrite our stories from the ruins of what’s been left us, to reconstruct the life as in “Pathology”—or as in the second section, “Manifest,” how do we remake something true from the misportrayals in our cultural touchstones…
The Halluci Nation, “Electric Pow Wow Drum”
What I love about this track and the next one is how they blend the traditional with the modern, the strange new with the familiar spirit. The Halluci Nation, formerly known as A Tribe Called Red, currently consists of Mohawk and Cayuga members, traditionally part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy along with the Oneida. There’s a political element running through The Halluci Nation’s music, where, just as the poems in the “Manifest” section speak to the present day alongside the historical, the combination of tribal songs and digital beats is an act of resistance against those who would frame Indigenous people as being stuck in the past, or worse, ‘dead and gone.’
There’s also a little nod here to the “Man Announcing Pow Wows and Rodeos,” who has his own tribute in the “Love Songs” final section of the book.
Supaman, “Prayer Loop Song”
Of course, I considered putting Frank Waln’s “What Made the Red Man Red” on this list, given that I also sample lyrics* from that same Disney tune in one of the poems in the “Manifest” section. But in recent years, I’ve been trying to move more toward futurities even in the times that I highlight the old chestnuts of colonialism. Supaman’s music always uplifts in this way, too, and the idea of prayer features in quite a few poems in the book.
*Fun fact: we didn’t think we’d get the rights to reprint the lyrics from such a fraught song, but the Disney company was very accommodating. I’m wondering if it went the same for Waln in his sampling…
Acceptance, “Different”
The “Manifest” section deals with identity not only in terms of Indigenous personhood, but also in a broader making and remaking of self. By the end of this section, many of the cultural stereotypes and Hollywood figures have fallen by the wayside, reframed or rewritten through lived experience, but a complicated relationship with their shadows remains. There’s a yearning in this song that has always spoken to me of renewal as much as of regret.
kate kilbane, “Sweet Unknown” (from The Medea Cycle)
“What starts as love
Often ends up as weight.
Just cause it’s gold
Don’t mean it’s not a cage.”
I encountered a selection of Kate Kilbane’s rock opera The Medea Cycle back during the dark years (what else can I call that time period…), and periodically afterward I’d find this song rolling through my head while trying to make sense of it all. The unknown was not always a sweet one in my case, but I felt a kinship with the intrepid, sardonic, hopeful narrator in this song, and I likewise began to wonder what my own destiny might be—and what journey it might take to get there.
Halsey, “Castle”
When I looked for additional songs to embody the third section of the book, the “Letters I Don’t Send,” I came upon this track by Halsey and wished I’d had it handy while I was originally living through and writing those poems. The “Letters” ask, what if you became all the bad names you’d ever been called, the witch, the harpy, the evil woman—nay, what if you became an evil queen? What power could you claw back, if you didn’t “keep [your] pretty mouth shut”?
Dua Lipa, “Don’t Start Now”
I would have thought this would have been my anthem a few years before it was released, when I believed I’d made it all the way through the recovery period. But I wasn’t fully there yet. It took even longer than I expected. Healing always does.
“Did a full 180, crazy,
Thinking ‘bout the way I was”
By the end of the “Letters,” the queen has founded her own matriarchy. By the time this song came out, I was “so moved on, it’s scary.” Once you’ve finally stopped flashing back to the ugly scenes, and your breathing has gentled again, and some days you even feel next to nothing looking back at it, you feel invincible. You feel reborn.
“Though it took some time to survive you
I’m better on the other side”
Sara Bareilles, “City”
The final section of the book is called “Love Songs,” which includes a series of poems honoring connections with the world around us. In the words of Bareilles,
“These boys only listen to me when I sing
And I don’t feel like singing tonight
All the same songs”
The mood of this track speaks to my penchant for what I’ll call ‘soloist melancholy,’ an aloofness or needed solitude that’s only really attainable within a crowded room.
It also reminds me of nights wandering around Lisbon, which is where I met my husband. You’ll catch several references to Lisbon in the Love Songs as well as briefly in the “Piano Factory” poem earlier in the book. You know how it is. You want to be lost, to be found.
Erin Bode, “Graceland”
As though the river itself is the instrument, as though everyone on the road is part of a spiritual collective, each pilgrim on the path forms a congregation, a choir. This song speaks to the platonic, communal, pastoral love that is part of the cosmic celebration of the “Love Songs.”
Incidentally, I first learned about this artist because of and during the relationship that first inspired “Pathology” — and like the speaker in this song (originally penned by Paul Simon, perhaps autobiographically), I think it’s fitting that you can carry some gifts forward with you even as you leave those other endings behind.
Prince, “When Doves Cry”
It was between this and Savage Garden’s “The Animal Song,” because, well, just like a Damien Hirst exhibit, there are a lot of animals in Cloud Missives. Unlike a Damien Hirst exhibit, the animals in Cloud Missives are more often alive and well.
As Bill Hader’s Stefon might say, this book has it all: primates, horses, alpacas, donkeys, fish, dogs, cats, chickens, crows, boll weevils, bears, turtles, fireflies, a swallow, a rabbit, a cardinal, Coyote—“animals who are no longer with us… animals who are no longer ours…,” all our non-human cousins—and a “crab love poem” that, like Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” frames sexual and romantic love in terms of desperate, animalistic survival.
The Weepies, “Same Changes”
Among the larger cast of characters of the “Love Songs,” the new lover appears.
Originally, the poem, “Love Song to Banish Another Love Song,” was a longer sequence depicting a slow progression from a past relationship to a new one. I eventually rewrote it to where the love song sings more to the self than to someone else. I think of this Weepies song that way, where the “he” in this song feels different than the “you” that lingers, and that “maybe it should matter / more to be myself.”
“And everyone says,
this love with change you.
Well I ask, isn’t that what love’s supposed to do?”
He Is We, “Happily Ever After”
How many times did I want to skip to the ending? How many times did I ask if I would end up happy? Isn’t that the frustrating thing, and also the source of such possibility: that mystery of the uncertain, unfinished future. I think the speaker (who is not the poet, mostly, sort of, almost) is full of that kind of wonder, before and after all they go through in the book, and I believe that speaks to the way healing is so often intertwined with hope.
I love this idea that even as there is some cosmic book being written, to which we don’t know the ending, we might also be the “author of the moment,” ourselves.
“We all have a story to tell.”
Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, “Stars”
Cloud Missives begins with the poem “Light Pollution,” and repeatedly returns to the auspices of constellations. It seems fitting to come back to that view of the night sky in ending this playlist, and in fact, the book does that as well, referencing the calendar of moons on the back of my family’s clan animal, the turtle, and his shell as a hearth and a site of memory. Maybe the ‘you’ can be many things, here. And even if the singer laments the sight of the night sky, the singer must first imagine the stars.
Listening to this song in the context of the end of Cloud Missives, I think of the spark of the wildfire versus the lighting of a prescribed burn, the constellations we make and the disparate balls of light that belie them, the myths we learn and the stories we create.
Kenzie Allen is the author of the debut poetry collection Cloud Missives (Tin House).