The Renunciations: Poems

ISBN: 1644450534

Author: Kelly, Donika

Condition: Used

About the AuthorDonika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa.Product DescriptionAn extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of BestiaryThe Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift ones 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.Review[The Renunciations] is a lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside of old mythologies and traumas in search of new stories fashioned from love and joy. . . . Like some sort of oracle, Kelly offers us the words to create our own destinies.-Oprah.comThese poems map the overlapping geographies of trauma and desire, combining Ovidian imagery with an emphasis on omission, redaction, and revision.-The New YorkerThese walloping lyrics land like a punch to the gut, but just as powerful is what Kelly elides and omits. . . . A harrowing work of courageous lyricism.-Booklist[The Renunciations] is impeccably structured. . . . Kellys 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.-Library Journal, starred reviewKelly (Bestiary) explores in her powerful latest the tenuous line between desire and trauma in poems that ache with memory and revelation. . . . 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.-Publishers Weekly, starred review[The Renunciations] is a powerful ode to resilience and drawing boundaries of the self while recovering from trauma.-Book RiotWith an expansive voice that is always tethered to the craft of material of stanzas and lines, Kelly creates a powerful second book [in The Renunciations].-The MillionsThe journey we take in The Renunciations is nothing short of rescue mission. And who else but Donika Kelly could offer such a lucid guide to the central figure of this book, as she navigates her most difficult years. . . . The poems are startling, disturbing, and relentlessly bold. I cant imagine a time before having The Renunciations as a part of my emotional ecosystem and poetic landscape. Thank you, Donika, is what I really want to say.-francine j. harrisWith Donika Kellys signature stinging beauty, The Renunciations names acts of wounding and making, refuses to separate elemental memory from the language of human remembrance. . . . Kellys poems gather us from cliff edge to river fold, from terror to more terror, from what cannot be known to what intuition and mirrors can divine.-Khadijah QueenIn The Renunciations, her vital new poetry collection, Donika Kelly harnesses the air, the earth, and flame to renounce the old gods: child abuse, violence, racial injustice, generational trauma. . . . The Renunciations is a work of stunning power, alive with haunting images, complex metap