Synopses & Reviews
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 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."
Review
"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
Review
"Kelly ( Bestiary) explores in her powerful latest the tenuous line between desire and trauma in poems that ache with memory and revelation....While many of the poems delve into difficult personal and familial ground, they also move toward a kind of catharsis where the truth is 'every body makes its own ash, / manages its own diminishing.' This devastating collection makes a startling and memorable elegy of those ashes." Publishers Weekly, starred review
Review
"These poems map the overlapping geographies of trauma and desire, combining Ovidian imagery with an emphasis on omission, redaction, and revision." The New Yorker
About the Author
Donika Kelly is the author of 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.