Today’s GalleyCrush is Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations, forthcoming from Graywolf Press on May 4, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma.”
First lines: “I was born into a house of air, / my dad born to bear, to share, his burden.”
Big blurb: “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
Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 104 pages.
Cover credit: Art by Lorna Simpson, design by Jeenee Lee.
Author bio: Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and 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.
