The Renunciations: Poems

by Donika Kelly

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644451472
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	970,775
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

House of Air, Hours of Fire 5

Now

Dear- 9

Dear- 10

Bedtime Story for the Bruised-Hearted 11

Ars Empathica 12

The Last Time 14

Love Poem 15

Continental Drift Theory 16

Cartography as an act of remembering 18

In the Chapel of St. Mary's 19

Then

Dear- 23

Oracle 24

Donika Questions the Oracle 26

The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided 28

My Father Visits the Oracle Before I Am Born 30

Portrait of My Father as a Winged Boar 31

Sanctuary 33

From The Catalogue of Cruelty 35

Now

Dear- 41

Dear- 42

Sighting: Virtue 43

Dear- 45

Dear- 46

Hymn 47

Sighting: Tarot 48

Dear- 50

Dear- 51

Now-Then

Dear- 55

Self-Portrait in Labyrinth 56

The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided 58

Self-Portrait with Door 60

Mounting Dead Butterflies Is Not Hard 62

Self-Portrait with Father 64

Apologia 65

The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided 70

Now

Dear- 75

Dear- 76

Where I End Up 77

I wasn't born haunted 78

Sighting: Almost 80

Sighting: Rockfall 81

Partial Hospitalization 82

A dead thing that, in dying, feeds the living 84

Dear- 86

After

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings 89

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/17/2021

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. (May)

Publishers Weekly

[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

“These poems map the overlapping geographies of trauma and desire, combining Ovidian imagery with an emphasis on omission, redaction, and revision.”—The New Yorker

“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

“Kelly (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 Riot

“With 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 Millions

“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

“In 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 metaphor. And while Kelly looks unsparingly at pain and suffering—her own and others’—with transformation comes joy.”—Ellen Bass

“In stunning poems such as these it requires not only excavation but thinking about how to present what is excavated, artfully. Kelly does that incredibly well. . . . [The Renunciations] is, overall, intelligent and deeply affecting."—Roxane Gay

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2021

Kelly's second collection retains the metaphor-heavy character of her debut, Bestiary, but exchanges that collection's mode of zoomorphism and mythology for something more elemental. The collection reckons with dual traumas and vacillates between delicate introspection and brutal honesty. The book is impeccably structured, each subsequent section—titled "Then" and "Now"—alternating between its twinned narrative threads and building to a gale force across its concise page count. "House of Air, Hours of Fire," the collection's opening poem and the only one to exist outside of its prescribed segments, powerfully forecasts both the thematic texture and shattering catharsis to follow: "my dad was born to bear, to share, his burden. / I was his dominion, a bit of land / turned to use." But it's Kelly's masterly balance of tone—as she shuttles her attention between such disparate traumas as sexual predation and the moment when two lovers' bodies no longer seem to fit together—that will linger longest, resulting in moments of gentle, heartbreaking melancholy: "did I not think, / my love, there at the moment / the ending began like a rock / slipped into the bay?" VERDICT 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.—Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL

Library Journal