What happens when a poem refuses to let a life become a footnote? Read LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s Past Tense: Portraits and Poems of Suicides. Find out why inside the full review.

Book title and author

Past Tense: Portraits and Poems of Suicides by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Genre, sub-genres and themes

Genre: Poetry

Sub-genres:
Documentary poetry; biographical poetry; historical poetry; contemporary formalist poetry; elegiac poetry; literary portraiture

Themes:
Memory; grief; mental health; suicide and its aftermath; stigma; family silence; identity; artistic ambition; social pressure; isolation; public reputation; illness; relationships; cultural context; remembrance; the limits of historical knowledge

Intended audience: Adult readers, particularly readers interested in poetry, biography, history, literary experimentation and psychologically complex subjects.

Minimum age: I would not market this as children’s or middle-grade literature. Given its content, I would position it for adult readers.

Content Warning

Content warning: This collection deals extensively with suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm, bereavement, depression, bipolar disorder, substance use, traumatic death, sexual abuse/exploitation, violence, firearms, and other mature subject matter. Several poems incorporate or closely reference suicide notes and descriptions of methods.

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Review

A strange thing happens when history becomes poetry: the distance between “a person who lived” and “a name we recognize” begins to shrink. Past Tense: Portraits and Poems of Suicides takes that idea, assembling twenty-three portraits from 1902 to 2022 and asking readers to encounter people as complicated lives rather than as biographical endings.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s distinctive choice is structural. She does not give every subject the same poetic treatment. Instead, the form changes according to the person and the surviving material: erasure poems draw from final words, Vachel Lindsay becomes a cento built from his own published lines, Aaron Swartz receives computer-code and Fibonacci poems, and other portraits use sonnets, tankas, acrostics, abecedarians, haibun, golden shovels, and villanelles. The variety could easily have become a literary gimmick. More often, it becomes the collection’s organizing intelligence.

The book also benefits from its documentary foundation. The preface explains that the author consulted newspaper archives, obituaries, trial records, interviews, recordings, and other surviving sources. That approach matters because memory itself is reconstructive rather than a perfect recording; documents and testimony cannot restore a person completely, but they can complicate the simplified version left by an obituary. The result is a collection interested in evidence while acknowledging what cannot be known.

That tension is also where the book becomes most debatable. Some poems move from documented facts into imagined interior landscapes, motives, or emotional states. LoSchiavo explicitly says she resisted forcing these lives into one shape and acknowledges that, in some cases, a motive remains a blank. Nevertheless, readers may wonder where historical reconstruction ends and poetic inference begins. A little more visual separation between sourced fact and imaginative interpretation could make an already ambitious project even more rigorous.

Emotionally, Past Tense is less about explaining death than about examining what remains around it: family silence, public reputation, artistic ambition, illness, social pressure, grief, relationships, identity, and memory. The author’s personal connection to Joseph LoSchiavo gives the collection an intimate thread, while the range of historical and cultural settings prevents the book from becoming solely autobiographical.

This is not a collection for readers seeking comfort or literary escapism. It is better suited to readers who enjoy documentary poetry, formal experimentation, biography, cultural history, and books willing to sit with difficult questions. It may interest students and writers curious about how research can become art.

The strongest achievement here is not simply that twenty-three people are remembered. It is that the collection keeps changing the way remembrance is shaped. Sometimes the poem behaves like an archive; sometimes like a memorial; sometimes like an argument with the limits of what anyone can know. That makes Past Tense an ambitious, unconventional, and affecting work.

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Help is available

If you are experiencing overwhelming thoughts or emotions, or are worried about someone else, please know that support is available. The following information may be helpful to you:

1. When in Australia, here’s the information from health.gov.au:

In case of emergency, dial 000.

For immediate assistance, support is accessible 24/7 across Australia. Reach out to:

• Lifeline: 13 11 14
• Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800
• Mental Health Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team in your state/territory
• Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636

For urgent care, visit the emergency department at your local hospital.

2. Here are other links for important contact details in countries across the globe compiled by Wikipedia:

Emergency telephone numbers per country

List of crisis lines per country

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