The poems of Lena Moses-Schmitt’s new collection, True Mistakes (96 pages; University of Arkansas Press), feature those gaps of perception in which what is obvious or straightforward becomes supplanted by the relentless onslaught of experience. A finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the collection traces that which we so often miss or move past in a hurry, and grounds us in a new mode of witness—where, “Like the sun, I can only look at you/when I don’t look.” Moses-Schmitt’s dazzling poems center the importance of carefully wrought introspection in negotiating the distance between writing and living.

In its considerations of time, mortality, and memory, True Mistakes figures death in the Rilkean sense, with death as a part of the body nurtured throughout one’s life: “Without knowing it, I teach my death how to run/right through me like a crack.” This undercurrent of morbidity threads itself through poems such as “Dear Future Me #15,” which addresses readers with such intimacy that it demands their participation, while also invoking a sense of dread: “I felt a hand. I felt you here with me./You’ve survived it. Now you’re digging.”

 Time in these figurations is subject to human error (“torn a mistake inside of time”). Moses-Schmitt teases out this inherent, shared fallibility, and her astute observations of past regrets give grace to the speaker of her poems. She gently positions the body as though it were hesitant in its decision to claim any one way of living: “a thought lodged: that I should stop searching/for whoever I was before./To lean toward action, not memory.” But this initial reserve, whether borne of indecision or overwhelm, is superseded by her allowing herself the present. She latches onto “the moment I decided to stop living/toward every possible life, & grab on/to the one that appeared.”

In True Mistakes, Moses-Schmitt’s project of questioning the self inevitably points to the presence of an interlocutor, an external driving force: “I can’t believe/I let you tell me who I was.” She runs up against the limitations of her self-knowledge through mediation alone (“I draw closer to understanding nothing/I make can speak”). Concurrently, she tugs closer that which resists definition or overdetermination—“As if I understood what beauty was,/as if it doesn’t constantly revise itself”—finding that so much of what she knows is mutable, like the self the poet continually questions and challenges, and like the project of identity itself.

Danielle Shi is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley. Her work can be found at Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms.