The Smallest Mistake We Call Human

Isaac Pickell writes from the middle of things: the tensions between Blackness and Jewishness, between loss and inheritance, between being seen and being claimed. But these poems don't search for wholeness so much as they honor the seams―the complicated, unresolved places that keep our lives together.

Grief runs through. Much of it is personal: parents aging, partners wavering, friends dying, old selves discarded. But some of it is inherited―grief for everything America never let become possible, for the history that shaped us but won't hold us, for language that never quite fits. Haunted by economics like redlining, eviction, and scarcity, the book also confronts the grief of precarity.

This is not a book of coming to terms, it's a book that sits beside you while you try to live with what you know. It asks how we carry loss, how we recognize love, and how we move forward when we're still not sure where we stand. The Smallest Mistake We Call Human is a sharp, tender meditation on identity, family, and the contradictions that make us.

Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet, PhD student, and adjunct instructor in Detroit, Michigan. A Cave Canem Fellow and graduate of Miami University’s Creative Writing MFA, he is the author of The Smallest Mistake We Call Human, It’s not over once you figure it out, and two chapbooks. Isaac has taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.