An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary
The Renunciations
Poems
- “[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.com
Then I rested, a cycle fallow. Said winter. Said the ground
is too cold to break, pony. Said I almost set fire
to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind.
Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river,
new groundwater, the well risen. I stood in the mud field
and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth
and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears:
whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time
to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.
—from “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.”
is too cold to break, pony. Said I almost set fire
to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind.
Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river,
new groundwater, the well risen. I stood in the mud field
and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth
and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears:
whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time
to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.
—from “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.”
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.”
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.”
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About the Author
Credit: Ladan Osman
Praise
- “These 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. . . . 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.”—Library Journal, starred review
- “The 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 can’t 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. harris
- “With Donika Kelly’s signature stinging beauty, The Renunciations names acts of wounding and making, refuses to separate elemental memory from the language of human remembrance. . . . Kelly’s 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 Queen
