The Renunciations: Poems

by Donika Kelly

Paperback, 2021

Status

Available

Tags

Publication

Graywolf Press (2021), 72 pages

Description

"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.""--Amazon.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member LibrarianRyan
This short work of poetry is an interesting but complicated read. I am not a poetry person and find that most of the time to my mind it’s gibberish. I think I understand the overall story is about a character and then their history with their father, his wife, dying, living, who’s, who, etc. I
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read this to fill a reading challenge prompt and while I can’t say I enjoyed it, I can say it was a different experience that I am happy to have broadened my usual reading habits.
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Awards

Lambda Literary Award (Finalist — 2022)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Poetry — 2021)
Publishing Triangle Awards (Finalist — Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry — 2022)
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (Poetry — 2022)
Heartland Booksellers Award (Finalist — Poetry — 2022)
Notable Books List (Poetry — 2022)

Language

Original language

English
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