The Renunciations: Poems [Paperback]

An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary

The Renunciationsis a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift ones 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 oraclean observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion endsthe 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 traumaa home whose construction starts with a razing.

[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. . . . Kellys second l'