The Renunciations: Poems
This poetry collection follows trauma, memory, and the long work of self-recovery. It rebuilds a life from painful inheritance through language that is intimate and unsparing.
Work Information
A poem sequence that keeps returning to injury, memory, and repair.
The Renunciations begins in a memory where love and violence coexist, then works through the relationship between body and language. The sequence of short poems becomes a way to reassemble a damaged self.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Graywolf Pr
- Published
- 2021-05-04
- Pages
- 94 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.6 x 0.66 x 23.06 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781644450536
- ISBN-10
- 1644450534
- Price
- 3338 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
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.”
Donika 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.
Reviews
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A Poetic Journey of Resilience and Redemption
In The Renunciations, Donika Kelly weaves a profound tapestry of trauma and transformation, navigating through the complexities of abuse, identity, and healing. Her poems, raw and poignant, delve into the depths of personal history with unflinching honesty, offering glimpses of resilience and the power of reclaiming one's narrative. This collection is a testament to Kelly's lyrical prowess and her ability to illuminate the path from anguish to renewal with haunting clarity.
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A remarkable gift
THE RENUNCIATIONS by Donika Kelly is an extraordinary gift. This poet has a heart that is a house so huge, built out of bold uncompromising love in the midst of generational trauma, systemic racism, and violence. Out of childhood sexual abuse, shedding mythologies of the past, the speaker creates a new world of refuge & shelter & chosen family assembled & sustained by the deepest ties of friendship and a reclamation of the self & body through desire. I’m so grateful to the poet for giving so deeply from her soul and life, finding the words (with the book’s accompanying Oracle, a presence throughout) for the unsayable, unspeakable. “Tonight my love we are free / of men, of gods, and I am a river/ against you, drawn to current and eddy,/ ready to make, to be unmade.”
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Gorgeous
Each line was delicate and brutal and heartbreakingly perfect. I loved Bestiary and this follow up collection is just as masterful.
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New, great condition.
Great condition. Shipped on time.