Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly lives in Iowa with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos. Kelly is an American poet and academic who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. She was born in Los Angeles, California in the early 1980s and moved with her family to Arkansas in the late 1990s. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016) and The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, May 2021). Oprah.com describes Renunciations as “...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.”

Live Readings

Poems

Hermit Thrush

We never knew winter before this.

Winter where none of the trees lose

their needles,

where ice creaks the limb,

and the hermit thrush forages for insects

on the forest floor. Winter where,

finally, the white girls, after a long,

long summer of bronze and muscle and shine,

cover their legs. Winter, where we can finally feel

beautiful, too.

We say we.

I mean I.

When they cover their legs,

I can feel beautiful, too.

from Bestiary (2016)

Love Poem

Let us be ocean and coast, a taking

into and over one another:

shifting sediment, a breaking down

of rock: dredge and deposit. A series

of prepositions meaning proximity,

although the most of us extends away

from one another. Once, in winter,

I ventured far inland, forgot the crash

of gravity pulling you over me

and away - forgot there is a place

where we meet and retreat but never let go.

Let this be a moment of remembering,

my love, as I stand at the edge of myself,

cliff and sea grass and the screaming gull above,

sighting your breadth to the horizon.

from The Renunciations (2021)

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