You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mattdube 's review for:
The Renunciations: Poems
by Donika Kelly
I wasn't a huge fan on this book, which presents (what reads like) an autobio narrative about being sexually abused as a child by her father through the frame of mythology-- so there are references to Chronos and mazes with monsters in them, etc. There are these passing references to Greek myth, though, the book's symbolic language isn't quite as literal as that most times. Instead, there's a lot of personified water, shores, and trees-- elemental forces instead of particular ones, and maybe for me that wasn't interesting enough?
The poems come in a variety of forms-- there are blackout poems at the start of each section, and usually one at least that looks epistolary, etc. They are varied, though most feed back into excavating this narrative of abuse and trying to work through it. As a narrative arc, it is interesting-- instead of going chronologically, we are fed pieces but not seen the scenes of abuse till 2/3 of the way through the book, and the withholding is effective as narrative. I do think a lot of poets structure their books to tell a coherent story, but not many do what Kelly does here to make that structure work for effect.
The poems come in a variety of forms-- there are blackout poems at the start of each section, and usually one at least that looks epistolary, etc. They are varied, though most feed back into excavating this narrative of abuse and trying to work through it. As a narrative arc, it is interesting-- instead of going chronologically, we are fed pieces but not seen the scenes of abuse till 2/3 of the way through the book, and the withholding is effective as narrative. I do think a lot of poets structure their books to tell a coherent story, but not many do what Kelly does here to make that structure work for effect.