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The Renunciations
The Renunciations: Poems | Donika Kelly
7 posts | 4 read | 4 to read
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 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.
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IndoorDame
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TheSpineView 💜💜💜 9mo
28 likes1 comment
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TheSpineView
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dabbe 💜💜💜 13mo
40 likes2 comments
review
LibrarianRyan
Mehso-so

3 ⭐ 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 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

Trashcanman Drive 2y
LibrarianRyan @Trashcanman Have you seen the price of gas. I know what it is here, I can only imagin what it is in Cali. 2y
41 likes2 comments
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Tera66
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#ThoughtfulThursday @MoonWitch94
1. I don't read enough poetry.
2. 🧙‍♂️🧙‍♀️🧙🧛🧛‍♀️🧛‍♂️🧚‍♂️🧚‍♀️🧚🧝‍♀️🧝‍♂️🧞‍♂️🧟‍♂️👼🎃🔮
3. I like spooky stuff
4. I'm a sucker for a beautiful or cool cover.

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Lindy
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Pickpick

I picked up this collection because it‘s a finalist for a Lambda Literary award in the Lesbian Poetry category. Wow! It‘s bold and beautiful and deals with difficult topics like surviving incest. (All the trigger warnings.) Donika Kelly often references mythology, which I find welcome for its psychic distance as well as the literary allusions. Meanwhile the poems portray a narrator transforming from the inside. #LGBTQ #poetry

KathyWheeler I usually buy all the Lamba award books that I can for my university library as long as they make sense for an academic collection. This one looks like it would. Thanks for posting about it. 3y
readordierachel Stacking. I read a previous collection and really loved it 3y
Lindy @KathyWheeler I‘m planning to read several on the poetry list. I will report back. 👍 3y
Lindy @readordierachel Bestiary is in the library‘s collection, and I‘ve added it to my TBR. Thanks! 3y
KathyWheeler @Lindy Thanks! I appreciate it. 3y
30 likes2 stack adds5 comments
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Lindy
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Tonight, my love, we are free
of men, of gods, and I am a river

against you, drawn to current and eddy
ready to make, to be unmade.

-from: Bedtime Story for the Bruised-Hearted

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Tera66
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Pickpick

I received this book from my Litterati subscription. For my second month I joined Roxane Gay‘s book club, Audacious. I read more poetry when I was younger and in college, but it‘s been awhile since I have really read any poetry deeper than Shell Silverstein. So I am not going to act like I understand more than I do when reviewing this book. And what I can say is; that I like the way that Donika Kelly puts words together. ⬇️

Tera66 This is full of trigger warnings, she discusses sexual abuse, child abuse and suicide ideation and attempts. And I really appreciate how vulnerable she is to discuss these things in her poetry. To lay her pain out to us in words, that is truly badass. It took me a bit to get through this, more than the month of September this was the pick for. Because I really sat with some of her poems and reread them. ⬇️ 3y
Tera66 I would caution other readers to be prepared for what is coming, she uses her words to build an image for the reader. And some of it is brutal, but it‘s her truth.
I would definitely pick up other collections by this author. This was a short book only 94 pages, and I think that was a good amount for the heaviness of the poetry.
3y
36 likes1 stack add2 comments