The renunciations Poems

Review by Booklist Review

In her first collection, Bestiary (2016), Kelly explored themes of sexual assault and attempted suicide by conjuring satyrs and centaurs to confront the figure of an abusive father. These themes haunt the poet's devastating second collection as Kelly further complicates that relationship, describing the father as a winged boar, "a giant, / a gold blade of a man," and an insatiable celestial being. This figure finally assumes the shape of a minotaur: "we remember / when he built this maze inside of us, // unfolded himself to sit now at the center." In seeking to unravel the torturous origins of this internalized monster, the speaker consults oracular wisdom. "Who placed the god in me? / or / What do I mean, when I say god? // The reply to both / being, Your father." These walloping lyrics land like a punch to the gut, but just as powerful is what Kelly elides and omits. In several poems, unspeakable acts are redacted by dark bars or by brackets that hold blank space, resisting closure. A harrowing work of courageous lyricism.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Kelly (Bestiary) explores in her powerful latest the tenuous line between desire and trauma in poems that ache with memory and revelation. Alternating between "Now" and "Then" sections, the poems grapple with the speaker's past abuse at the hands of her father, as well as the collapse of her marriage in the present. A skillful practitioner of metaphor, Kelly refers to both the father and the spouse in these poems in mythopoetic terms as gods with the power to either grant the speaker some form of grace or to cause utter destruction. Conversations with the speaker's father turn on what cannot be said, as in the lines, "He is sorry for me,/ but he will not admit me." In searching for a way to commune with the lost beloved, the speaker turns to her body as a way to recover memory: "I hunt your scent, your skin,/ practice resurrection in the palm of my hand,/ unfold you over the uneven terrain/ of my own body in the dark." While many of the poems delve into difficult personal and familial ground, they also move toward a kind of catharsis where the truth is "every body makes its own ash,/ manages its own diminishing." This devastating collection makes a startling and memorable elegy of those ashes. (May)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Kelly's second collection retains the metaphor-heavy character of her debut, Bestiary, but exchanges that collection's mode of zoomorphism and mythology for something more elemental. The collection reckons with dual traumas and vacillates between delicate introspection and brutal honesty. The book is impeccably structured, each subsequent section--titled "Then" and "Now"--alternating between its twinned narrative threads and building to a gale force across its concise page count. "House of Air, Hours of Fire," the collection's opening poem and the only one to exist outside of its prescribed segments, powerfully forecasts both the thematic texture and shattering catharsis to follow: "my dad was born to bear, to share, his burden. / I was his dominion, a bit of land / turned to use." But it's Kelly's masterly balance of tone--as she shuttles her attention between such disparate traumas as sexual predation and the moment when two lovers' bodies no longer seem to fit together--that will linger longest, resulting in moments of gentle, heartbreaking melancholy: "did I not think, / my love, there at the moment / the ending began like a rock / slipped into the bay?" VERDICT Kelly's second effort feels scraped raw, seeking to understand humanity in primal terms in the same way as her debut, but here building to even grander emotional and linguistic crescendo.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL

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