Isaac Pickell writes from the middle of things: the tensions between Blackness and Jewishness, between loss and inheritance, between being seen and being claimed. But these poems don't search for wholeness so much as they honor the seams-the complicated, unresolved places that keep our lives together.
Grief runs through. Much of it is personal: parents aging, partners wavering, friends dying, old selves discarded. But some of it is inherited-grief for everything America never let become possible, for the history that shaped us but won't hold us, for language that never quite fits. Haunted by economics like redlining, eviction, and scarcity, the book also confronts the grief of precarity.
This is not a book of coming to terms, it's a book that sits beside you while you try to live with what you know. It asks how we carry loss, how we recognize love, and how we move forward when we're still not sure where we stand. The Smallest Mistake We Call Human is a sharp, tender meditation on identity, family, and the contradictions that make us.
About the Author :
Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet, PhD student, and adjunct instructor in Detroit, Michigan. A Cave Canem Fellow and graduate of Miami University's Creative Writing MFA, he is the author of The Smallest Mistake We Call Human, It's not over once you figure it out, and two chapbooks. Isaac has taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.
Review :
Issac Pickell's poems are a homage to family and community, braiding memory, daily life, and the collisions of history into a striving for quiet joy. With a language that reaches for rectification of the self and the often-troublesome ways we treat one another, his poems turn on the small indelible moments that shape our lives, bringing the chaos of the world into sharp local focus. As Pickell reminds us, "everyone is eventually/shutout of somewhere" and this book makes a place for them to call home. --Matthew Shenoda, author of The Way of the Earth
At the center of The Smallest Mistake We Call Human are the body--a mother, a father, a family, a country--and the poet's work of connection and mourning. In poems intimate, visceral, tender, and elegiac, Pickell attends to the relentless catastrophes of our living and dying. --Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Isaac Pickell's poems are an abundance of intimacy and strength. Mothers, relationships, identity: this is the fullness of a vibrant emotional life experienced through verse. --Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of Hold Your Own
