Donika Kelly

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.”

Poems

The Renunciations

The grown woman remembers when she breaks a woman to save herself.

Shame, in both the wanting and the wanting's return.

I try to find comfort in the inevitability of science, when what I lack is faith.

this place is full of faith in the unknown, and I don't know how to believe in what I cannot see.

Fathers are for children and I was never a child, only a smaller image of myself.

How long was he a child? What god swallowed him whole?

What I bring, I've always had: a dull knife, a child afraid of the night and herself.

I know it was never meant to be eaten; it was always meant to spoil.

The Renunciations quotes

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