Confessional
Confessional, published by Finishing Line Press in 2024, is a journey into the parts of the mind we do not want to consciously recall, the things we did or didn’t do, the feelings we refuse to feel or those we fear to acknowledge. This collection moves you through the dark places of a single mind to find the cataloged confessions that should never have seen the light. They are numbered and scattered as you stumble upon them out of order, but the final confession, #835, is buried the deepest. Be warned not to dig, pled with to stop pulling what should be dead back to life where it can bleed and hurt again. Be warned about the final confession and keep going anyway. Individual pieces from this collection were published in Peregrin Journal, in Platform Review from ARTS by the People, and in Fauxmoir.
Finishing Line Press | Paperback | $22.99
Publication date: August 23, 2024
“We are creatures of secrets.”
What People Are Saying
“‘We are creatures of secrets,’ Fletch Fletcher writes, each page of this book a ‘space of white / that is my confessional.’ These self-interrogations of one who laments a father’s absence, ‘the impotence of prayer,’ and the loneliness of the outsider, who imagines ‘the sound the sky made / when it first saw the ocean fill itself’ and ‘dawn through ruffled eggshell drapes,’ are informed by both a Beat sensibility and the turbulent romanticism of Goethe. Fletcher leans toward affirmation, remembering ‘untilled plains, / clean and free / of headstones’ while recognizing that ‘confession and storytelling are both true / to the soul if not always / to the tongue.’ Confessional is a disturbingly raw and profoundly tender sequence.”
— Michael Waters, author of Caw
“In the vital candor of Confessional, Fletch Fletcher unmasks the heart nearly deadened by myths of masculinity, measures the weight of blood, lays bare depression’s loneliness, and reveals how the self can be an ocean that fills itself, that inhales primal fear and shame and then push[es] a breath to a gale // into other lungs. Indeed, these are poems whose witness transforms the breath; read them with a pen in hand. Fletcher exhumes truth from the saltwater-soaked soil of buried knowing and asks himself, and us: Do you remember how you felt / when your skin was open sky, / untilled plains, / clean and free / of headstones? I cannot wait for you to read this book.”
— Darla Himeles, author of Cleave
“Fletch Fletcher has utilized an intimate and soul shattering vehicle, the confessional, to transform the raw energy of life lived into poetry. “…it must be true first that confession is an energy before you / can understand how laws work…so I marked and measured and buried mine / let them seep slowly.” You are holding the book of a poet who feels to the very depths of his being; a poet who does the shadow work of digging and surfacing to write poetry that is ecstatic in its seeing.”