Untangling Ourselves to Become Love and Light
By Serena Agusto-Cox
Love Letters from Cuckold Creek by Kristin Kowalski Ferragut reflects Lao Tzu’s opening quote that if we cannot find what we’re seeking, “it is because what you seek is already in your possession.” In this case, it is perseverance, an ability to “Loosen and puzzle, tighten, start again,” as the poet says in “Untangle.”
Ferragut’s poems are journeys into the sublime and the mysterious, much like the lives we live daily. We believe that we know where we’re headed but sometimes our “best laid plans,” or even our lack of planning, lead us to unknown, and sometimes painful, places.
In “Alive on Cuckhold Creek II,” the poet’s narrator takes a wrong turn that leads to some pain, but it’s also a humorous situation in which a daughter is mothering her mother. The poet reflects, “You hope I learn // a lesson, but it would be a perfect dream to do again.” Isn’t this always what we expect when we choose wrong or just end up in an unexpected mess? That we would learn from it and not do it again.
But often, we are thrown into these situations repeatedly, seemingly not learning a thing about avoidance. But perhaps avoidance is not what we’re meant to learn. The poet reveals, “Nothing invites abandon like water. I go in.” She calls on perseverance. We continue on despite setbacks, with the poet noting that “We suffer / despite ourselves.”
As readers take this journey through these love letters, they will realize that these poems are not so much about love as they are about deep appreciation for the people we become over time and through the experiences we have (both painful and loving). These experiences allow artifice to crumble away and enable us to “Forget to recall who we aim / to be; that we make history / with every smile, the phantom / of our best self.”
Through these experiences, some of which “add pressure to crescendo” that can strain us to a breaking point, the poet reminds us that “we’ll need to trick ourselves out of regretting” because “pre-forgetting becomes learning.”
Our becoming begins with “the tilt / of the earth” because as we are off-kilter, we are forced to engage with ourselves and others. And we are reminded that “life can be more / gorgeous than” our own asks. Ferragut enables us to borrow that perseverance to “rewrite futures” and “rehab thoughts” to create our own Love Letters from Cuckold Creek.
Serena Agusto-Cox, Pushcart Prize nominee, editor at The Mid-Atlantic Review published by DayEight, coordinates poetry programming for the Gaithersburg Book Festival. Her poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies. To help poets, she reviews and markets collections through Savvy Verse & Wit and Poetic Book Tours, respectively. Echoes Carry, published by Beltway Editions, is her first full poetry collection.
Kristin Kowalski Ferragut is a poet-mom who teaches, writes essays, songs and stories, plays guitar, rides her bike, and hosts readings and open mics. She is author of poetry collections Escape Velocity (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Love Letters from Cuckold Creek (cyberwit.net, 2025), and the children's book Becoming the Enchantress (Loving Healing Press, 2021). Read her work, including her Mind’s Eye blog at https:// www.kristinskiferragut.com