The Renunciations: Poems

Kelly’s second collection retains the metaphor-heavy character of her debut, Bestiary, but exchanges that collection’s mode of zoomorphism and mythology for something more elemental. The collection reckons with dual traumas and vacillates between delicate introspection and brutal honesty. The book is impeccably structured, each subsequent section—titled “Then” and “Now”—alternating between its twinned narrative threads and building to a gale force across its concise page count. “House of Air, Hours of Fire,” the collection’s opening poem and the only one to exist outside of its prescribed segments, powerfully forecasts both the thematic texture and shattering catharsis to follow: “my dad was born to bear, to share, his burden. / I was his dominion, a bit of land / turned to use.” But it’s Kelly’s masterly balance of tone—as she shuttles her attention between such disparate traumas as sexual predation and the moment when two lovers’ bodies no longer seem to fit together—that will linger longest, resulting in moments of gentle, heartbreaking melancholy: “did I not think, / my love, there at the moment / the ending began like a rock / slipped into the bay?”