A review of Causa Sui by Elizabeth Knapp

In Causa Sui, Latin for “self-caused”—or perhaps more accurately in the context of this book, “self-inflicted”—Elizabeth Knapp has given us one of the most important collections of poetry this year. Using a wide array of emotional tones and an equally varied set of forms and styles, Knapp engages directly with many of the issues affecting our nation and our planet as a whole. By turns humorous, sad, ironic, witty, angry, resigned, these poems are essential reading and vital acts of resistance.

Elizabeth Knapp is a professor of English at Hood College in Frederick, Md., and the founder of Hood’s low-residency M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. Causa Sui is her third collection. Her previous book, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, was published in 2019 by Washington Writers’ Publishing House; her second, The Spite House, was released by C&R Press in 2011.

This is a collection that pulls no punches. The opening poem, “It’s Okay to Worry About the State of Britney Spears’ Mental Health” tackles a topic that in a lesser poet’s hands could easily have been played for cheap laughs or bathos:

“& by that I mean it’s ok to worry

about the state of humanity’s 

mental health, Britney being//

a synecdoche here, a part standing in 

for a whole, & further, a metonym,

when she becomes the woman//

who represents all women….”

It’s hard to imagine any poet more skillfully bringing together simultaneous celebrity worship and judgement, misogyny and the exploitation of women, mental health crises, and entertainment as distraction from existential threats:

“The metaphor could be stretched

even further to mean Britney 

equals the earth in crisis—melting//

polar caps and biblical floods….//

Who cares about about

something as inconsequential as dying

as long as the music keeps playing?”

Pop culture references serve this poet well in several poems, including “I Teach a College Poetry Class in Which No One Has heard of Talking Heads”:

“I might as well be speaking Latin, 

which, come to think of it, is sort of//

what I’m doing, as I go along ad nauseum

about how they should stop thinking// 

with their brains & start thinking

with their ears. Stop making sense,

as David Byrne put it.”

Though it’s a somewhat light-hearted take on the necessity of other forms of thinking besides the intellectual when making art, one also detects regret at the fraying of cultural continuity between generations.

Another poem, “Is Poetry Dead,” tackles the perennial debate over the relevance of poetry in our digital age—a continuation of an argument that has in fact been going on through many ages.

“Poetry died a century ago with Eliot.

Poetry died the second you picked up// 

your pen. Dear poet born in the 20th 

century, don’t you know nobody writes//

poems using pens anymore?”

The poem concludes with a thought that should make any poet, indeed any lover of poetry, shiver.

“Admit it, part of you//

wants to believe this poem was written

by a human, & part of you fears it wasn’t.”

In addition to the depth of thought and linguistic brilliance of these poems, note the poet’s skillful enjambments that drive each poem’s argument relentlessly, enhancing their rhythm and
pacing.

These poems exemplify the poet’s ability to present multiple complex themes in a rich, yet conversational tone, a quality existing abundantly throughout the book.

One section of the book, ironically entitled “We the People," comprises a series of centos (found poems) derived from the notorious Project 2025. They are all very short; here’s an example quoted in full to give the (unsavory) flavor:

“Ronald Reagan is

Ronald Reagan is

Our yardstick Our

wars are always// 

cold Opportunism

is the flag we fly

over the forests//

we burn to make

room for our

unborn children”

One shudders to imagine the poet giving a close reading of the document in order to carefully stitch together phrases that enhance the already sinister intent of Project 2025.

One truly fascinating element in the collection is a series of semi -erasure poems scattered throughout that extract human language from ChatGPT outputs. It sadly is not possible to quote or even reproduce these poems that feature a few bold italic words representing the poet’s voice on top of a grayed out background of AI-generated text. 

There is hardly any issue that this poet does not face up to, whether gender, race, climate change, or the rise of AI to name just a few. Her ability to weave these topics into poems that speak meaningfully to readers without falling into polemic or propaganda is possibly the most remarkable thing about Causa Sui. Despite the frequent grimness of the subject matter, the poet manages to inject humor or at least some irony into each poem.

 I’ll close with the final poem, the title poem in fact, which offers at least a glimmer of hope:

“In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

postulates that all human activity revolves//

around the subconscious attempt to deny

the reality of our own mortality….//

Someday my breath will meet 

the earth too, & every song I ever tucked//

under my wing will open itself and take flight.”

Causa Sui is a powerful and necessary collection that demonstrates the ability of poetry to offer solace and fuel resistance, to mourn and encourage. 

Learn more about Elizabeth Knapp, read some of her poems, and buy Causa Sui here.