A novel from a poet is always cause for concern. Poets, so involved in the details of the language, can find story a bit too much to comprehend. That’s the general gist reviewers like to give when they talk about novels from poets.

But Kimberly Campanello is not just a poet. She’s an artist.

When I saw Use the Words You Have pop up on Instagram I was intrigued.*

More and more I’ve been thinking of the identifiers of poet, writer, novelist, essaying, and how I’d love to do away with them.

The word writer is too broad. I talked to Penny Wincer about this on her podcast (shameless plug or accidental reference, who knows!) and she compared it to being a photographer, how she had no great love of cameras, they were a tool. That’s it exactly, the word writer relates the person to their tool: words. Whether they write letters, poems, novels, shopping lists, blog posts, essays, articles, they are still, by definition, a writer. So, when a poet branches into fiction, how do you define them? Are they now a poet and novelist? A poet and writer? Or are they simply what they have always been, an artist.

This book does not feel like a schism from Campanello’s previous books. It feels like a natural progression. A deepening and expansion of themes and concepts seen in her earlier work. Already she has shown a skill at stretching the boundaries of form in Motherbabyhome and sorry you were not moved.

This novel, and I call it a novel because it is presented as a novel, is aware of the questions around biography, the self, and what a writer does when they use their own life to create a story, whether that’s through poetry, fiction, or otherwise.

When I started to read it, I was intrigued by the characters and setting. The main character is K, a sixteen-year-old student from the US on exchange in Breton. It is the late 1990s. K having the same initial as the author’s name, and having read the author’s social media posts about ‘the poet K’, I was aware there was likely an autobiographical element to this work. It was enjoyable, easy to read, with enough depth to satisfy me. I was not overly challenged, and I suspected this would be a well written work of autofiction that I would enjoy but would not make me think too deeply. Oh, I was wrong.

I’ve read many novels over the years that are closer to memoir in their obvious use of biographical details. Recently, All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso. These are novels in which the main characters biographical details are essentially the same as that of the author.

If we think the authors are unaware that this is obvious, that they think that they are fooling the reader, then we are naïve. Writers are well aware that if they name a character with a similar name to theirs, with similar life details, then most readers with any knowledge of their life will pick up on the autobiographical element of the novel. Novels like Drifts by Kate Zambreno go as far as to have the main character writing a novel called Drifts during the book.

There are different motivations behind autofiction, from speaking to some authors, I’ve gathered there can be a desire to protect people in their lives or protect themselves from people in their lives. Yet, if they truly wanted to hide the autobiographical nature of the work, there are more ways to disguise life in fiction, and the reader would be none the wiser. My inclination is to think that autofiction, a term I don’t particularly enjoy, is intentional as an artform, not necessarily for a love of biography, but to challenge what a story, what narrative, and what the self, are.

I’ve been saying autobiographical and not memoir because there is a difference between taking aspects of your life and creating a story and between staying true to details and presenting a period of your life as fact. It’s something I struggled with when I wrote Milk. Memoir didn’t feel fitting, it did not feel like I was writing the story of something that happened to me and how I felt about it. It was closer to my poetic sensibility, voice, headspace, whatever you want to call it. There was an I in it, the same I that had been in my poems, and yet the resemblance to the rest of my life was not accurate. It couldn’t be, nor did I intend it to be. I didn’t know how to put words on that at the time, and I’m not sure I do now.

But reading this book has confirmed my suspicions that the form of the novel is going through an interesting evolution.

How this book is framed is not just an auto-fictional novel. The perspective shifts between the third person ‘K’ and the first person. We are close to K at 16, 17, in the first flush of new love, but as we go on, we hear a new voice, and yet the same voice, in the I. The I of the author, the I of the poet, the I of K, twenty years on. There is no wool being pulled over your eyes. you are aware that the I is the author and the author is K, and yet you are also aware that this is a novel, and that the I of the author is not necessarily the I that the author lives, that there are facts in here and there are fictions, and that that is how all art is created.

*thank you to the publisher for an advance copy of Use the Words You Have. A review wasn’t solicited or expected, I merely begged for a copy on Instagram and they kindly obliged.