The Renunciations
Poems
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- 65,00 kr
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- 65,00 kr
Publisher Description
An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary
The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.
In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
