Review by New York Times Review
IF YOU'RE AN AUTHOR who specializes in, say, writing about science for general readers, then your first book will be regarded by most people as . . . the book you wrote first. That it was your inaugural effort will have no special significance; your work will be judged the way books are typically judged: as interesting or dull. But if your goal is to write about the imaginary lives of imaginary people or - particularly - to write poems, then your first book may be another matter entirely. Because now it's not merely the book of yours that happened to have the earliest publication date. Now it is the start of your career. "Career" is a fraught word where literature is concerned. On one hand, literary artists are expected to develop (or at least to change), and "career" is generally the word we associate with that process. On the other hand, we don't like to think of writers as advancing within their occupation the way most people do - filling out forms, going to conferences, interviewing, politicking, buffing a résumé and so forth. We prefer artistic careers to seem more like the blossoming of a chestnut tree than the expansion of a LinkedIn profile. This is especially true for poets. As the scholar Jesse Zuba sharply observes in his study "The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America," for poets "success both corroborates and corrodes artistic legitimacy," such that the career of a poet is often enhanced by looking as if one has tried to avoid a career in the first place (although that, in turn, may be viewed as a careerist maneuver). This twisty state of affairs emerges, as Zuba puts it, from "the conflicting imperatives of professionalism and romanticism." Essentially, modern poets are caught between the historical image of the poet as "untutored genius" and the contemporary reality of the poet as faculty lounge aspirant. First books are therefore particularly significant and delicate projects, since they need to suggest the writer has potential to develop along established lines ("have a career . . . ") while also possibly calling those very standards into question (" . . . that isn't a career"). It calls for an acrobat's balance and occasionally a diplomat's patience. Donika Kelly's new - and first-book is called BESTIARY (Graywolf, paper, $16), and it is in many respects a typical poetic debut. It's a prizewinner, for one thing: In any given year, more than 25 first collections will appear as the result of contests, the black hole around which the galaxy of American poetry now rotates. And like most prizewinners, it was selected by a more senior poet (in this case Nikky Finney) and sports an introduction that seems to have been fueled by at least a gallon of coffee. "Keep reading," Finney advises, "and you realize this poet rests her alphabets in the mythology of fire and the resurrection of ecstasy." There is a method to this gonzo prose, believe it or not. If you're committed to the idea that poetry deranges the senses, but you're also routinely asked to introduce books conforming to the thoroughly mundane strictures of the average writing contest ("Manuscript must be paginated, with a font size of 11 or 12. . . . "), then it may be tempting to use your preface to deposit some alphabets in the fire of ecstasy or whatever. It's a way of resolving, or at least obscuring, those "conflicting imperatives." But the framing of a book isn't the book itself, nor is the launching of a career merely a matter of being paraded across the stage. There are also the poems, those balky players, which remain what they are (or aren't) regardless of the scenery that encompasses them. Kelly's writing in "Bestiary," fortunately, is striking enough to weather the spotlight. Kelly is a descendant of Sylvia Plath by way of the wintry Louise Glück - her poems are animated by roiling, mostly dark emotion, but they're spare, composed and often quite short (of the more than 40 poems here, only three stretch to a second page). The tone ranges from guardedly tender ("I play a little song in the key / of your name") to self-critical ("My ashen body / and untrimmed nails") to almost clinically brutal (in a poem about Pegasus: "Foaled, fully grown, from my mother's neck, / her severed head, the silenced snakes"). Her diction is just formal enough to give her lines an appealing unnaturalness: Words like "cur," "apportioned" and "perpendicularity" buttress conventionally poetic mainstays like "body," "love" and "light." There aren't many jokes here (notwithstanding the wink in a title like "Sonnet in Which Only One Bird Appears"), there are relatively few nods to popular culture, and there's not a single reference to philosophy or theory. WHAT APPEARS in abundance, as you might gather from the title, are beasts - albeit symbolic ones. That is, of course, in the nature of a bestiary, which in its medieval incarnation joined animals real and fantastical with the moral qualities they supposedly represented. (From the entry for the elephant in the 12th-century "Aberdeen Bestiary": "They never fight over female elephants, for they know nothing of adultery.") In Kelly's hands, the concept becomes a way of thinking about construction - of a self, a life, a story of a life - and the potential failure that always haunts such projects. "Bower," for example, is one of three poems here about the bowerbird, that diligent engineer: Consider the bowerbird and his obsession of blue, and then the island light, the acacia, the grounded beasts. Here, the iron smell of blood, the sweet marrow, fields of grass and bone. And there, the bowerbird. Watch as he manicures his lawn, puts in all places a bit of blue, a turning leaf. And then, how the female finds him, lacking. All that blue for nothing. But the bowerbird will keep building, just as Kelly will return to him only two pages later in another poem with the same title. The fantastical creatures in "Bestiary" are almost all hybrids - mermaids, minotaurs, griffins - as opposed to mere monsters, and their in-betweenness calls attention equally to the danger of dissolution and the possibility of unity. Kelly is drawn to both outcomes, and her uncertainty gives her writing its peculiar magnetism. If a few poems here seem slight, or too willfully autobiographical, that is a small price to pay for the possibilities her work suggests. Because possibility, perhaps even more than accomplishment, is what we want from first books; it is the foundation from which a career begins its brick-by-brick rise. And there is something potentially sad about that. If the first book is constructed partly with an idea of the future in which uncertainties are resolved - in which mermaids become women, or simply become comfortable as mermaids - what happens when that book is all there is? Max Ritvo died of cancer last year at age 25 ; his first book, FOUR REINCARNATIONS (Milkweed, $22), is therefore also his only book. It is good-humored ("My genes are in mice, and not in the banal way / that Man's old genes are in the Beasts"), appealingly sly ("Enoch has written / We are made in His image / but God may have many images. / He may want even more") and at times surprisingly whimsical ("Every day a chicken dies so that my mom may live"). Nor does Ritvo shy away from the possibility that the start of his career will be the entirety of his career. From the end of "The Hanging Gardens": Babylon before Eden, orchard before garden, our variety before variety, shame before shame-knowledge: When shame was an entity wandering even from the body into the tea, into the brass doves, into this autobiographical moment. I must take full responsibility. Quite right. I will move on. This is very fine, and if it acquires a sheen of sentiment because of what it suggests will never emerge - that is, more poems from Ritvo - this doesn't change the fact that a reader knowing nothing of poetry or this author might find it worth rereading. This is the life poetry leads beyond the confines of the poetic career; the life in which lines exist for what they are, not for future lines they might suggest. The life in which an early poem is also a poem, and a first book is also a book. DAVID ORR'S new book, "You, Too, Could Write a Poem," will be published this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
While confronting a harrowing memory in Little Box, Kelly writes, You'd rather be a simpler animal. / You try to imagine what the bear feels. And in her prize-winning first collection, recently longlisted for the National Book Award, Kelly does conjure a roaring menagerie of creatures. Yet, unlike its medieval namesake (a moralizing catalog of breathtaking beasts), this Bestiary swelling with swallows, centaurs, and satyrs proffers only truth. The sprawling How to be alone, for example, a series of page-centered single stanzas, recounts the horrors of attempted suicide and sexual abuse within the context of a woman and the dogs who keep her warm, guarding the little lock of her peace. In Archaeology, a poem ruptured by white space, the poet grapples with a disquieting resemblance to her father, declaring, I am dragging his face / out of my own. This uneasy duality and relentless pluck pulse through each page. As Kelly writes to the ever-fluctuating block of ice, Be a thing that breaks / before it bends. Unflinching, fierce, and true, this collection is just that.--Shemroske, Briana Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her astounding debut, Kelly, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Prize, catalogs creatures familiar and mythical as she turns monsters into recognizable portraits of humankind. The poems employ language that sinks its teeth in at vulnerable moments, easily piercing the tenderest spots: "Freedom is a thread of light snaking/ the canyon like an ant through a conch." Despite the collection's eponymous grounding theme, Kelly doesn't strictly use mythology to teach a moral lesson. She sets the tone with "Catalogue," outlining with care the anxiety and excitement of growing up: "You grow. You are large./ You are a 19th century poem./ All of America is inside you." Poems such as "Fourth Grade Autobiography" explore childhood memories with precision and clarity. Kelly's speaker recalls flashes of neighborhood parties at a time when youthful innocence starts to crack. "My favorite things are cartwheels, salted plums,/ and playing catch with my dad," she writes. "I am afraid/ of riots and falling and the dark." The compact scenes of the poem "How to Be Alone" burn like a hot knife to an open wound; the speaker's loneliness becomes armor in the wake of her mother's death and father's violent transgressions. Kelly's creatures howl and whimper as she imparts emotional truths: "Love,/ I pound the Earth for you. I pound the Earth." (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Kelly's first collection touches on animals legendary, half-human, and otherwise. "A strong choice for most collections." (LJ 11/1/16) © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
