True Mistakes
By Lena Moses-Schmitt
University of Arkansas Press, March 14, 2025
Review by Emily Alexander
In “Awe,” a poem from Lena Moses-Schmitt’s debut collection, True Mistakes, the speaker describes a hike to an ocean view: “...the closer I walk to it, my feet in the dirt, / the sun on my face, the nearer I arrive / to a realization.” Though the speaker has announced that she “no longer believe[s] in epiphanies,” anticipation builds for, if not epiphany itself, the natural beauty that may elicit one. But the speaker knows the promise offered to her by the sweeping vista towards which she walks is a false one; one cannot escape the self by seeing. While being “so full of nature I cease / to perceive” seems initially to describe a transcendent communing with beauty, such an experience in actuality is tantamount to death. To look outward implies a world beyond the self, but looking remains always locked within one’s own perspective. For Moses-Schmitt, a writer and visual artist, the image is at once an attempt to reach beyond the self and also a relentless reaffirmation of the inescapability of the self.
In a conversation between Moses-Schmitt and Martha Park in Lit Hub, Moses-Schmitt says that in both visual and literary arts lies a desire to “captur[e] the sensation of looking.” This collection is interested in both beauty and perspective itself, looking as a cyclical, self-reflexive act, which both expands and contracts one’s consciousness. “I’m just a body with a mirror inside it.” A self reflecting the world around it or a self reflecting the insides of the self?
In True Mistakes, it is both: looking as constriction and possibility, freedom and suffocation. “Figure Drawing: Lover” is split into three sections. In the first, titled, “I Speak,” the speaker is “practicing an introduction / to my work,” in which she expresses some ideas about the themes that interest her before unraveling into a more casual series of questions, unproven theories, sketches. The second section, “He Speaks,” begins with a question the speaker asks “him:” “How do you feel when I draw you?” His answer is quoted, italicized, and the conversation goes on until it is interrupted by parentheticals in which the speaker reflects on his answers and her own reactions to them. He tells her that being drawn makes him “feel more like a product,” and the speaker finds this sad, assumes he is saddened by it, though her lover repeatedly insists otherwise. The poem enacts the way a self is projected onto another, how looking at someone else so inescapably becomes self-reflexive, at least or especially in art. “Is what I draw / a portrait of him, or of my mind, / trying to make his body new?” the speaker asks in the final untitled section of the poem. Moses-Schmitt is interested less in the unbridgeable distance between people than she is in the locked doors of the self that barricade this interstice; how one is inescapably yoked to their own consciousness and yet also somehow separated from it.
There is a looping claustrophobia to the speaker’s self-awareness, a cycle that creates a sense of hovering over the images and things the poems describe, a resistance to landing. For what can really be true in poems? To describe “a cloud of hydrangeas” is like taking a photo of them, “[t]ake being the crucial word,” writes Moses-Schmitt, “I’m stealing // the sight & divorcing it / from environment, making the image portable, / aspirational because it’s something I can hold…” The speaker is often skeptical of language, instead looking towards visual art to reflect her experiences. She describes a David Hockney painting in which a “diver arcs toward fragments of his reflection,” where he “collapses into texture, / into things we cannot say.” She quotes Lydia Davis’s response to Joan Mitchell’s Les Bluets: “she understood she couldn’t understand.” But of course such descriptions defy the thing they purport to seek out: to acquiesce to illegibility, to the shifting inutterability of reality, is to stay silent.
These poems, then, seem interested less in uttering it than in tracing the texture of the speaker’s failure in the face of a futile yet unflagging desire for understanding through language. There may be no utterable truth but maybe there is an utterable opposite of silence, which is a sort of hope: an insistence on the self, the particularities of one’s failures, the shape one invents for their shapeless desire. In “Scene with Nude, Helen Frankenthaler, 1952,” Moses-Schmitt writes, prompted by a “long green shape” in the center of the titular painting: “Most true things are also impossible / to decipher the green shape / What is that green shape…” The speaker can acknowledge that which is beyond language—this painting, among other things—but she resists languagelessness almost as though she can’t help herself. How the “green shape” becomes almost a solid thing in the poem, less description than it is object as the simple phrase is repeated again and again—a thing for the sake of itself, indescribable and imprecise and also impossibly exactly what it is—the materiality of the object emphasized over its potential for symbols and meaning. But still she asks the question knowing it may be unanswerable, no longer content with the irretrievable depths of the real, she wants to know what the green shape is, the plain fact of it is so anticlimactic and unholdable. “Unraveling / to abstraction … is a method of survival,” she writes, for it is unbearable to let a beautiful thing just be itself—there she goes saying it, there I go after her calling it beautiful, calling it anything at all.
This dilemma lies at the heart of the collection, succinctly summarized in “Awe:” “I’ve never known what to do with beauty.” What is all this looking for? The speaker seems to understand the contradictions of her impulses, that to dissolve into pure looking would be a languageless state of being, not a book full of words trying to describe it. It is exactly this contradiction, this push and pull of consciousness, the mind’s cyclical self-criticisms, that these poems seek to capture—the shapelessness of what is rather than the shaped narratives of what is named.
“Whacher is what she was,” writes Anne Carson of Emily Bronte in “The Glass Essay.” In Carson’s analysis, “whaching” is both an internal and external process, a way of seeing and also feeling, understanding, sensing, a state of being. “To be a whacher is not a choice. / There is nowhere to get away from it, / no ledge to climb up to.” I thought often of this “whaching” while reading True Mistakes, this encompassing overwhelm of information and images, how impossible this task of collecting, categorizing, making sense of the self from within the self and the world beyond the self and the world in relation to the self, this dizzying confusion of perspectives and the inescapability of one’s own at once limited and infinite gaze. After all there is no looking beyond—without, from outside of—the self. And yet looking beyond—outward, toward some external thing—the self is perhaps the closest one can get to an “emptiness [which] is not empty,” a sort of clarity or peace, a plain being. It is only through looking, then, that “finally everything expands.”
Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. She is the author of the poetry collection True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025), which was selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Her poems, essays, and visual essays appear in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, The Believer, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Narrative, Cincinnati Review, The Yale Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She lives in New York, where she works as the assistant director of publicity at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press.
Emily Alexander is from Idaho. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Narrative, Conduit, and Penn Review, and she has written essays and criticism for Write or Die, The Rumpus, and Cleveland Review of Books.