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The Things You Can't Remember Become the Things You Can't Forget
Paperback
Biographies GeneralGeneral Poetry
Publisher: Roadside Press
Published: Jun 1 2026
Pages: 108
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.26 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
THE THINGS YOU CAN'T REMEMBER BECOME THE THINGS YOU CAN'T FORGET is a meditation on love and the story of how to remember your best mistakes. Starting with an old silver music box and a bad Netflix show about how to clean your house, Lori Jakiela weaves together her first job as an engraver of jewelry and charms at Things Remembered with her first love and the breakup that led to a long bout in bed and a short marriage to a man she barely remembers. Equal parts memoir and spiraling poem, with detours into the lives of artistic heroes as diverse as Johnny Thunders, Tom Waits, and Kurt Vonnegut, this is a story of believing in love enough to keep failing at it until you learn how to succeed.
The poems in The Things You Can't Remember Become the Things You Can't Forget flow into and out of one another, both moving forward and calling back. We are introduced to physical objects and objects of the poet's mind, in a tour of the curated drawer of lived experience. Keep only those things that speak to your heart, [Marie Kondo] says./What my friend fears: giving outsiders insight into what speaks to her heart. Ultimately our lives are composed of nothing but the bits our minds are able to or choose to retain-some of them lovely as a first bite of lobster.-Kerry Trautman, author of Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say
Lori Jakiela is the queen of the wise one-liner. Fiercely sad and heartbreakingly funny.-Stewart O'Nan, author of WEST OF SUNSET, EMILY ALONE and more
It is said that we see the world we are looking for-Jakiela sees human kindness and human folly in equal measure, and describes all of it vividly, poignantly, and with a brilliant sense of humor.-Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire and more
Those of us whose parents, like Lori's, live through the depression know about stuff. Never throw anything away. You never know when you might need it. And most of that potentially useful stuff (and less useful stuff) has a story attached to it. It's the stuff great poems are made of. Like the ones in this collection. One object's story leads to another story which connects to something else, even the vaguely remembered mistake of a first husband, and you have a memoir in poetry. I have a ticket stub from the first Mets game I took my girlfriend to in 1965. Swedish Death Cleaners: Kiss My Ass. So it goes.-Alan Catlin, poet and editor, Author of Work Anxiety Poems
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