Sep 23

Sep 23 The Renunciations: Poems

Author: Donika Kelly
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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

I read The Renunciations as part of Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club with Literati. I’ve been trying to read more poetry (or, rather read poetry *in general*) this year, so I was really excited to see it in the lineup. I liked it very much, and I’m glad I read it.

This collection is heavy — it’s about the poet’s experiences with both childhood sexual abuse and the recent dissolution of her marriage to her wife. As you can expect, it’s raw and moving. But I also loved the way these poems were simultaneously layered and accessible — each of them begs to be read twice, three times. Give them that attention, though, and they’ll unfold in front of you beautifully.