"Direct but nuanced, tender but fierce, Callie Siskel’s Two Minds supposes that if we could see ourselves from just the right angle we could understand our lives. Born of great loss, these precise lyrics do not aim at consolation alone; no, they struggle eloquently to put the pieces of a life together. Such is the true work of poetry. This is an enormous debut.”

— Sally Keith

“Callie Siskel’s beautiful and spare poems in Two Minds, traverse the delicate yet relentless landscape of grief. These poems address other subjects, or perhaps attempt to address other subjects, but grief underlies everything, sprawling across and underneath everything. These poems often instigate with a scene from memory or an observation, then they are propelled by the declarative, oftentimes in plain diction and clean syntax, as if to stack each sentence on top of another, because that way life will not topple over. Maybe in the end, grieving is about the self as Siskel astutely writes: “Vanity and grief are closer than we think.//Grief's call-and-response/a mirror of our own making.” Siskel’s poems are wise and thoughtful, quietly evocative.”

— Victoria Chang

“In Two Minds, Callie Siskel invites us into an ambivalent house of snow-bruised grief where the hungers of loss, love, and familial bonds intersect at the interstices of art and memory. With a palate knife, Siskel scrapes at the raw face of elegy, revealing interior forms on a canvas where the poet’s father lives beyond death. Reminiscent of Bishop’s One Art, these intimate poems achieve an enduring, painterly resonance that is startling and lucid in language.”

— Rachel Eliza Griffiths

“Callie Siskel’s Two Minds is a stunning, singular debut. Deeply compelling, it is the wisest book I know about the ways grieving divides us from ourselves. These exquisitely written poems chart with delicacy and nuance the passage we face entering that hall of mirrors appearing before us after great loss. Yet Two Minds is also a poetic reflection on the wholeness we reconstruct upon re-entering the world again as we reconcile loss with possibility so we may reclaim a personal future. Two Minds is an instant classic.”

– David St. John