Barrelhouse Reviews: I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg by C.M. Green

Reviewed by Eleanor Ball

fifth wheel press / February 2025 / 35 pp

“When they cut down the trees on I-64, / I took it to mean the world was ending. // My life was a pocketful of apocalypse.” So begins I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, C.M. Green’s extraordinary debut chapbook. This hybrid memoir explores Green’s life in Williamsburg, Virginia while attending the College of William & Mary, coming of age, and struggling with intense loneliness, bipolar depression, and suicidality. Through poetry and flash essays, Green interrogates questions of faith, belonging, and place. How do we craft our places of belonging, and what does it mean to truly “leave” somewhere?  

Green’s relationship with Williamsburg is complicated. When I first opened the book, I expected Green was “never leaving Williamsburg” because of nostalgia or affection, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Most of the vignettes in I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg explore difficult moments from Green’s life, particularly with regard to their bipolar depression, delusions, and suicidality. Green experiences vivid delusions about poisoned food, being under surveillance, and David Bowie talking to them. Throughout the chapbook, they become increasingly unmoored—both from their peers and from reality. “There’s a door that goes nowhere, and I feel just like it,” they write in the essay “Campus Center.” When they seek help at the Wellness Center, they are told “Come back next semester when you’re more stable, and then maybe we can help you.” 

Eventually, they receive a diagnosis for bipolar disorder. Along with leaving the Catholic Church, this is the catalyst for their healing to begin: 

For years, bipolar was enormous, and to admit that I had it would be admitting that I was unfixable. And I liked not having a name for how I felt. If my madness was uniquely my own, it wasn’t my fault that I was a wreck […].

But when she [a therapist] read those symptoms, which mapped so neatly onto my experience, bipolar shrank. It became something I could hold in my arms and look all the way around. 

In addition to Green’s mental illness, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg traces Green’s journey out of Catholicism and into a full embrace of their queerness. “My madness and my queerness feel like sins of equal magnitude,” they write in “Bicentennial Park.” As a fellow ex-Catholic, I related strongly to this element of Green’s journey. One of the most meaningful essays was “Our Lady of Walsingham,” in which Green writes about Eucharistic adoration, the practice of worshiping the consecrated communion bread, which is believed to contain Christ’s presence in body and soul. While this is a healing practice for many Christians, Green’s insecurities and doubts are exacerbated in the presence of Christ’s perfection: 

[. . .] I lit a candle with the only prayer I still knew: is anyone there?

When the answer was no, I sat against a pew on the cold flagstones and hugged my knees and wept. I thought I was alone, but a woman with straight blonde hair approached me and handed me a pack of tissues. I have never been pitied the way she pitied me, her eyes burning with unearned love. Her kindness was a sword in my side. 

As Green learned from their bipolar diagnosis, language is power. It grants us the power to craft the homes and truths we need. “A sin’s only a sin when you call it a sin; I plan to excise the word from my speech,” they write in “St. Bede Catholic Church.” As Catholics, the Church is our house, everything from the hearth to the lock to the floor we stand on. When we leave, we build ourselves new homes, log by back-breaking log.      

Throughout I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, Green continuously grounds their personal story in the land and its history. Their writing beautifully evokes both the natural landscape and the built environment of the Virginia coast. In the untitled poem that opens the collection, they write:  

[. . .] August in Virginia is heavy. 
I bore it. The first time I drove myself, I stopped

at the only coffee shop between Richmond and Williamsburg.
It waited in a strip mall in Quinton like a punk who can’t get out.

[…]

Sometimes I was Catholic on those drives. Sometimes I was crazy. 
Often, I was afraid. It was the last scrap of road that took me

home. Home? Williamsburg is an open mouth, bloody gums 
where teeth used to be. […]

I am always going to Williamsburg, never leaving it.
I am always driving east from Richmond.

Green carries this grounding theme of place into the chapbook’s structure; they divide the chapbook into five parts, each of which takes place in a different part of Williamsburg. The collection is bookended by untitled poems, and the middle consists of linked, nonlinear flash vignettes. Each vignette centers a unique Williamsburg location, from Mermaid Books to Lake Matoaka. Labelled maps at the beginning of each part develop the reader’s sense of place even further, and the nonlinear vignette structure mimics Green’s bipolar depression-induced struggles with fragmented memory. It would be easy for the poems to fall flat in comparison to the nonfiction or vice versa, but Green demonstrates their skill in both genres with hazy, poignant prose and couplets that sing and snap, subverting expectations through their play with figurative language, line breaks, and rhythm.  

Green’s essays also tackle first love, friendship, and community. In the hands of a less skilled writer, a chapbook balancing this many ideas could easily feel unfocused and sprawling. But Green’s focused, tight structure allows them to weave many threads into a vivid tapestry depicting the complexities of their life in Williamsburg. While I occasionally wished Green pulled harder on some threads, such as their journey into queerness, I closed the book satisfied. 

This book feels like a guided tour of Williamsburg, delivered not by a tour guide, but by a friend. A friend who takes you by the hand and shows you the best hole-in-the-wall doughnut shop ever, the office park where they went to therapy, the theater where they spent countless late nights at rehearsal. This book reminded me that writing about place is about us just as much as it’s about cities and landscapes. Even though the chapbook ends with Green finally driving away from Williamsburg, the places that haunt us never leave us completely. We carry the marks of them forever. We are different people because of them—for better or for worse. 

Eleanor Ball is a library professional by day and writer by night. Her reviews and criticism have appeared with ANMLY, ballast, Vagabond City Lit, and other publications. Find her on Bluesky @eleanorball.bsky.social.