Reviewed by Matt Usher

Three Walled World
by Ellery Capshaw
CLASH Books
April 2026, Paperback, 120 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1960988881

There are well over one hundred and fifty poetic forms, and that’s largely only a western centered list. Many poets of the modern era have left these aside in favor of free verse, often with explorations of format over variations on themes. Three Walled World by Ellery Capshaw is one such collection, leaving aside meter and rhyme in favor of experiments in spacing, verse paradoxically in paragraph form, and, to the heart of this work, a facsimile of a TV script.

Much to the same point, the collection is split into acts, mainly along the central events that rocked the author’s life: her career as Natalie on As the World Turns, and the death of her father. Act one opens with scattered recollections of her family, well set in the preternatural twilight of childhood memories alongside the more straightforward development of her early acting. From a class where she may have been half the age of the second youngest to serious auditions, one travels with Capshaw through the tempest of a life lived too early.

As we follow Capshaw into this early acting, we see more poems heavier on script style, one that parallels what is written elsewhere about the mnemonic ability of those who stride the stage and set. In the first case, a dramatization of an early production of Annie. Here, too, we see early the liminal prose poems that give a very close accounting of her development as an actress. But the innocence of immersion is not long to last.

Act two begins with the lustre starting to be lost, the struggles of bullying on set and off, and the blurring of lines for a child thrust before the world. A brat on stage, a liar off, one feels for the child who puts on this performance that cannot please everyone. The poems verge more on prose, the earlier playfulness with form not quite matching the tone. But here as well we have a script poem, one of a more bleak outlook: “Natalie Snyder is: prop.”

Much less do they match the intermission. Here is a bleak interlude of a life lost, first to alcohol and then to suicide. This is the keenest the collection is emotionally; we feel every bit that his death was crushing and would, as we see later, define so much of her life.

Following this, things begin to fall apart, nothing quite having its place. The words are lost and wandering, rising to depersonalization and the flight from self enforced by the inversion of a young life.

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily,” wrote the author of the Hagakure. Here this is not a matter of strict discipline, but a way of handling the inevitable plunging adrift of loss. Capshaw is raw and immediate about her dreams of death, hiding nothing. Death looms over her, and she leads us along that darkened path.

We feel the girl becoming a woman, one who looks back on her life as Natalie on screen and the simple joys of spending time with her father. Along with this we have likewise raw considerations of the pains of growing: the flaring and flaming out of romantic affection, the grand question of sex, and the morbid call of alcohol. Here, too, we are spared nothing of the internal life of an alcoholic who suffers doubly from the knowledge that she is one. We have the excuses, the just-one-mores, and the struggles of day by day sobriety. Cresting this hill at last, she closes on thoughts of her father, healing this time, remembering the good while leaving aside the bad.

There is, unfortunately, not much that can be said about form and the attendant craft, as this is a collection of free verse and prose poems. Not much to be missed by those unattached, but one perhaps looks in vain for the poesy behind the title of poet. Capshaw’s style is replete with stream of consciousness, the unmitigated thoughts and feelings as they come to her, always following closely who she was without the distance of recollection. Free verse flights are spaced and disconnected, early signs of the depersonalization that will become manifest later. The prose poems follow closely the former and are exercises in a dreamy first person where the voice is the voice of the past as it happens.

Consider this collection if you’re fond of immediacy and raw emotion in your poetry. As well, there is a likewise shape to the language, often opaque in its metaphor. It doesn’t pause to highlight figurative language, instead sublimating it into the remembered narrative.

About the reviewer: Matt Usher is an agender, highly neurodivergent writer and musician who likes poetry, tabletop roleplaying, trading card games (mtg and ygo), and professional wrestling. They are based out of Brooklyn with their two partners in a happy polecule.  Most of their works are short stories but it happened that their first credit was in literary criticism. If you want to reach out and/or contact them regarding their reviews or stories (please do), you can find them at https://bsky.app/profile/mattusher.bsky.social