If You Have to Go: Poems

by Katie Ford

The transformative new book from “one of the most important American poets at work today” (Dunya Mikhail)

I am content because before me looms the hope of love.
I do not have it; I do not yet have it.

It is a bird strong enough to lead me by the rope it bites;
unless I pull, it is strong enough for me.

I do worry the end of my days might come
and I will not yet have it. But even then I will be brave

upon my deathbed, and why shouldn’t I be?
I held things here, and I felt them.

—From “Psalm 40”

The poems in Katie Ford’s fourth collection implore their audience—the divine and the human—for attention, for revelation, and, perhaps above all, for companionship. The extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood—in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss—these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” In song and in silence, Ford inhabits the rooms of anguish and redemption with scouring exactness. This is poetry that “can break open, // it can break your life, it will break you // until you remain.” If You Have to Go is Ford’s most luminous and moving collection.

Genres: Poetry

73 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 7, 2018

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

If You Have to Go was the ninth book in my October poetry project. I'd seen the author give a reading from this book and knew it was about her divorce, but I didn't think the reading gave a very clear sense of what the book was like. I ended up being very impressed with it! The poems often felt quite formal in language and structure, but taken together they make for a very moving and absorbing story. A great reading experience overall.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final poem of this collection left me breathless.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend (especially to poetry readers who can simmer in the thing).

Very moving even though there were sections I wasn’t able to fully process this reading. Read each poem 2-5 times this round; can see myself coming back to Part II, The Addresses, over and over again.

Address 31 had me in tears (twice) in public, which is, I think, my highest form of praise.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are sonnets. Fourteen lines. And unlike any sonnets I have read. Unlike any collection I've read. they are utterly heartbreaking and beautiful. Katie Ford's writing is simple and then utterly mysterious. Her poems leap and settle and stun me.

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection explores the work of mourning, which traces the end of a marriage and home. Ford begins by locating grief within and around the body, which “is now the house, the rooftop, the lake and the lotus.” This collection is in a series of 39 sonnets, which connect in a crownlike procession and which variously address the self, the reader, love, grief, and God. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood―in the bedroom, these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.”

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

On every page of this book, there are lines I want to absorb, to memorize, to steal for my own.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tomorrow City, fragments,
dance, they do, in the shimmering shadows,
of skyscrapers made by men, not Gods,
above, the drifting agony of a cloud,
the fragile sky mirrors its despair,
the awfulness of a life lived sideways,
people and places betray,
an ache for straight ahead reality,
peripheral vision erodes, implodes.

Chris Roberts, God Suddenly

[Viktoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last poem, “All I Ever Wanted”, is beautiful. Still contemplating the rest of the poems.

[Kent Winward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry Katie, I had the bad fortune to read your poetry book on love lost at the same time I was reading Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap: Poems.

[Gwendolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, good poetry comes in two forms. (Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, but I still think it’s a useful distinction.) First, there’s poetry that’s immediately appealing and approachable, poetry that captures an emotion, event, or thing and renders it in a new and surprising way. This kind of poetry is comforting in its accessibility. Second, there’s poetry that’s at first murky and maybe even impenetrable but that, upon close study and multiple re-readings, reveals a truth or a feeling that is almost beyond language—something that can only barely and fleetingly be captured in words, often in words that don’t seem to fit together on the first reading. This kind of poetry demands a lot from its readers, but it’s also more rewarding over time. I would place Katie Ford’s If You Have to Go in this second category. I’ve spent a lot of time with this collection over the last week, and I still feel like I’m only just barely grasping some of its meanings. The parts I feel like I’m starting to understand are powerful and primal. A few excerpts:

Home, I made you best I could,
please don’t break again beneath me?
I beat heavily upon my life until it gave.
As for prices, I’ve paid and paid.

all on earth does fall through all.
It’s the through that’s prolonged.
It’s the through that spills.

I downed once the sight of a man
who swam out and in at the beach
then read between swims on the sand
clearly in repair from what was required of him.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t tell you how many times I have returned to Katie Ford’s book IF YOU HAVE TO GO, and in particular, the addresses. This crown of sonnets, which makes up the bulk of the book, is one of the most lyrically beautiful things I've ever read. It is also a work of great subtlety. Drawing inspiration from a physical prop - a hair comb with "carved medieval scene," she ponders the end of a marriage, a longing for "the communal table," and the vicissitudes of faith, using the richly textured language of a medieval kingdom - both earthly and heavenly. I love how fully we are immersed in this medieval world, with its thresher’s ox, “whipped down narrow market streets,” and how masterfully this world she creates evokes the emotional complexities of loss and belonging.

[Madison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of words to think about in this one. The feeling I was left with can be best described as grief, I think. A recommendation from Ekstasis's list of books to read.

The Addresses
- "I make my bed every morning. / I don't know where to start / so I start with the bed. / Then I fall to my knees against it."
- "I'd rather starve than eat alone the bread of heaven. / So it's true the kingdom knows me? It let me see these horses? / There's no proof, just so much given: / animals that thirst, a river near horses. / One looks up, the other drinks down. / Beneath a red line goes the day: sundown."
- "my Eden-sore mind"
- "Love lays me on the rack. My desire's all gone wrong. / It's starved. And strong."
- "The beautiful alive doesn't grant perspective. / It grants desire."
- "To wake so cool scares the thought of me, / yet it's better than a soul lukewarm."
- "Do you think I don't know that when I say Lord / I might be singing into the silo where nothing is stored..." ... "Well, everyone thrashes / against a wall / in this life. / I don't know what I mean, / but I mean it. I don't know what to want, / but I want it."

Psalm 40
- "I am content because before me looms the hope of live. I do not have it; I do not yet have it."

The Ready Heart
- "Never had there been a love on this earth in its quiet speech that hasn't been prepared for by something that keeps the lamp on at strange hours"

Iridescent Heart
- "some form of yourself you love best because it survived the pain"

You Occurred To Me
- the whooooole thing

[Twila Newey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love the whole collection, which is impressive, her skill with language and form technically stunning. The sonnets are carefully constructed, the language is rich and surprising--as good as poetry gets. The last poem, about her daughter I believe, was my favorite in whole though images and lines throughout made me catch my breath. But it seemed just as a poem recognized or approached any sort of beauty or solace, the analytical mind began deconstructing awe. I prefer awe to sit on the page. So, this was another long, beautifully wrought mourning, not as bleak as Deposition, but still without much hope. I will return to this one for the language alone at some point, but I don't know that I'll pick up her earlier collections.

[Monica Snyder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psalm 40

“I am content because before me looms the hope of love.
I do not have it; I do not yet have it.

It is a bird strong enough to lead me by the rope it bites;
unless I pull, it is strong enough for me.

I do worry the end of my days might come
and I will not yet have it. But even then I will be brave

upon my deathbed, and why shouldn’t I be?
I held things here, and I felt them.

And to all I felt I will whisper hosanna for goodbye.
It is sweet to think of myself, alone at that very moment,

able to say such a thing
to all that was my life,

to all that was not.”

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

The bulk of this book is a series of linked sonnets processing the end of a marriage. The structure makes for a fascinating read--the last line in each one becomes the first (or is modified to become the first) line of the next.

Faith, desire, and what to do with yourself when the structures of your life no longer stand.

"all I ever wanted
was to sit by a fire with someone
who wanted me in measure the same to my wanting."

[Noreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

You need to take time with these poems; they are not immediately accessible and require close reading. But we’ll worth it and the final poem in the collection is stunning.

[Ashley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel bad giving the low star review, but I just didn't care for her poems. They're not badly written, they just weren't my style.

[Melody Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite.

[Brittany · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea. A few gems but I really couldn't get into the emotion or story of this collection at all.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lovely poetic and religious meditation on the end of a relationship.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminds me of The Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Brodio with the way it keeps pressing on the same thing (loss) over and over again. It is very artful, yet there's a sorrow at its core.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex yet slim volume dealing with the aftermath of grief and struggle with desire. The last poem is wrenchingly beautiful.

[Taylor Whisler · Rating 4 out of 5]

very deep & interesting

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Mark Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorites weren’t the overlapping sonnets that dominated the collection but the bookends — the ones that stood on their own. Lovely. I must revisit them.

The sonnets made me feel a rolling sense of unease, which I think is notable and powerful. Rather than try to sink fully into them, I decided to just read through them in a continuous strand. The effect is one that simultaneously draws me back to re-read the pieces and repels me to stand back for a while. I’m unclear as to why. I’m intrigued by it. I will certainly revisit these pieces again and again.

[Lisa Preston-H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ford’s collection of poetry If You Have to Go is the first book of poetry I’ve read from cover to cover. I bought the book expecting to read it like I had poetry in the past: skip around from poem to poem, finding something that I can connect with. I realized her poems were connected in this book, especially the crown of sonnets through The Addresses section, telling the story of a marriage dissolving — reading them from page 3 to 62 opened up a new world of reading and understanding poetry. Every month, I re-read parts to find another poem in the collection that I understand in a new way.

It is set in a dream-like language, each poem like a new room of ache of the marriage falling apart. It’s not set heavy in pity and anger but the in range of emotions that come with a relationship dissolving.

I love this book. I love that I can pick it up time and time again, rereading parts, and find something new. I will never tire of this writing, what it leaves me thinking, and what it stirs in me.

[maddie kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this collection are lucid, yet difficult to grasp, making tangible the necessary work of reading and re-reading; as I read and re-read, I gained different entryways into poems that are challenging and beautiful, and it was in the joy of that work as a reader working alongside Ford that the wonder of this book arrived. I memorized the collection's astonishing final poem for a poetry class and was awed at how many times the poem transformed and how many new readings I acquired as I repeated it to myself; it is a poem I now repeat to myself often.