The Renunciations: Poems by Donika Kelly

The Renunciations: Poems Reviews

• 
  Roxane

  Trauma is a hard thing to write about. In stunning poems such as these it requires not only excavation but thinking about how to present what is excavated, artfully. Kelly does that incredibly well here in a book of poems about childhood sexual abuse and the lifelong aftermath. There are also poems about love and the end of love, about memory and remembering. The last two sections are particularly strong in a book that is, overall, intelligent and deeply affecting.
• 
  Pau

  “self-portrait with a door” has to be the most heartbreaking poem i have ever read. “I will bear him wherever I am taken / and no one will kill him and he will not die.” my god.
• 
  Jill Mackin

  So much pain in her poems.
• 
  Leah

  I returned this to the library before I could write down my favorite poems 😡 but these were on the whole very powerful, many were about abuse which could be hard to read but were striking collected together. a lot of ocean and landscape imagery, in particular about nature entering or reforming the body.
• 
  Sarah Koppelkam

  Go slow with this one. I cannot imagine what this was like to write. In The Renunciations, Donika Kelly tracks an intergenerational legacy of childhood sexual abuse. Kelly uses the voice of "The Oracle" throughout to blur the lines between mother and child; childhood and adulthood; life and death. Kelly is particularly strong with motif (doors, the sea, rings on a trees) in a way that is never heavy-handed and somehow manages to surface emotion more than even her most bluntly saddening poems.
  
  Two favorites were "Love Poem" and "Sighting: Tarot." "The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided" and "Self-Portrait with Door" were also particularly strong, but cannot be called favorites as they are devastating.
  
  Love Poem -
  Let us be ocean and coast, a taking
  into and over one another:
  shifting sediment, a breaking down
  
  of rock: dredge and deposit. A series
  of prepositions meaning proximity,
  although most of us extends away
  
  from one another. Once, in winter,
  I ventured far inland, forgot the crash
  of gravity pulling you over me
  
  and away - forgot there is a place
  where we meet and retreat but never let go.
  Let this be a moment of remembering,
  
  my love, as I stand at the edge of myself,
  cliff and sea grass and the screaming gull above,
  sighting your breadth to the horizon
• 
  Deedi Brown (DeediReads)

  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.
• 
  Lyd Havens

  Literally breathtaking.
• 
  Oscreads

  Shook!! Incredible poetry collection. Definitely going to be one of my favorite books this year.
• 
  Michelle | musingsbymichelle

  Incredible.
  
  I can’t believe I get to say this, but thank you Roxane Gay for sending me this book.
• 
  Kurt

  Really knocked out by the second half. Equal parts gruesome and powerful.
• 
  K.C. Bratt-Pfotenhauer

  “Even an oracle / cannot choose what or how / to remember.”
  - The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided
  
  Donika Kelly has done it again, folks. A big fan of her first collection “Bestiary,” I was thrilled to receive an ARC of her newest collection “The Renunciations” from NetGalley and was not disappointed. Kelly’s collection builds on the foundations laid in Bestiary, continuing similar themes and exploring new ones. The narrative arc of the work, too, is striking. Divided into sections “Now” “Then” “Now / Then” and “After,” the script flips between the idea of the speaker’s childhood and a failing marriage. From love poems full of aching tenderness towards an increasingly absent partner to poems grappling with the idea of worship, inheritance, and abuse to poems making apologies by the handfuls, this collection is one that will stick with me for a very long time.
• 
  Anahiz

  This book was written by a former poetry professor of mine so I may be a bit biased, but I think it was great. Dr. Kelly carries this melancholic feeling throughout the collection through the way she talks about trauma - specifically sexual abuse and the everlasting effects - as well as love - both beginning and ending. I really appreciated the brutal honesty in which she writes about memory and how it often fails her as she's writing some of these pieces. I recommend giving this a read.
• 
  Laura Sackton

  Read my full review here:
  https://booksandbakes.substack.com/p/...
  
  These poems are beautiful and heart-wrenching. There's a lyrical formality to them that makes the surprising twists and turns of language even more impactful. I loved Kelly's first collection and this one is equally amazing, if brutal. CW: child abuse, rape.
• 
  christina

  The sanctuary—the stained glass,
  four girls saturating it with soft chatter,
  small pots of stargazer lilies, a lace ribbon
  for each pew—this place is full of faith
  in the unknown, and I don’t know
  how to believe in what I cannot see.
• 
  Candace H-H

  An intense read about longing, trauma, family estrangement and nature. The brackets used within certain poems are a unique way of expressing what cannot be said.
• 
  Connie Hall

  Painful, beautiful poetry.
• 
  Ksenia

  I will bear him wherever I am taken
  and no one will kill him and he will not die.
  D. Kelly "Self - Portrait with Door"
  
  The Renunciations is a follow up poetry collection to Donika Kelly's outstanding debut Bestiary. Unlike Bestiary this book presents a singular narrative broken in parts, an autobiographical confessional, driven by exploration of trauma caused by the sexual abuse she suffered in childhood at the hands of her father; and its aftermath.
  
  It is hard to pass judgement on something so personal that clearly took a lot of courage and a lot of time to process and create. The Renunciations is an awfully effective collection that packs a solid emotional gut punch, sometimes so solid I wish it came with a trigger warning - because it gets graphic and it dwells. The repetition cycle is a familiar inescapability.
  
  Nothing to do with the thematic contents, but the book opens with Anne Carson quote and unfortunately some of the poems do sound like Carson imitation. Which would be fine as a singular tribute, yet as a stylistic choice it was distracting and rather weakened some of Kelly's work. It is hard to not get caught in Anne's lingual nets, nevertheless, one should always know better. There is no need to be anyone's second violin when you have a unique and beautiful sound of your own. That personal disappointment aside, it was a fantastic if painful experience and I am, as always, looking forward to reading more of Donika Kelly's poetry.
  
  Favourites: Bedtime Story for the Bruised - Hearted, Donika Questions the Oracle, Self - Portrait with Door, Apologia, Where I End Up .
• 
  Chris

  There are reasons I bought this book the day I first heard about it. And there are reasons I put off finishing it until the last day of the year. I related to closely to some of the poems from the author's first book, that I had to have this one.
  
  The book alternates between the past and the present, and then the future. It would be lovely to think that the past is only in the past and stays there neatly. What do you do when the past intrudes on your present? What of the past that lives inside of you? What of the past that formed who you are? There is no good answer (I think) but these poems perhaps touch on those questions.
  
  I want to understand every word of these poems. I want to write responses to some of them. There are things that are easy to say, and things that are not. They are not what you think they are, the easy and the difficult. It was painful to read these. I wish I could fix both of us, but I'm not sure there is a fixing.
  
  I am struck when I read poetry, at how much of us gets read into each poem. It's those parts that I relate to, that I feel like I understand. I hope I did these poems justice with my reading of them, but I know I did not. I will come back another year, and find ways to fit my self and my understandings into these powerful words, into the spaces between the words.
• 
  Tera Slawson

  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.
  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. 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.
• 
  Crystal

  These stunning poems cover a dark history of abuse but there is hope and renewal in the end.
  
  "Mounting Dead Butterflies Is Not Hard" was easily the one that left the biggest impression. That "I keep looking away" feels so true to (my) life.
• 
  Ellora

  When I saw Roxanne Gay suggest this book, I wanted to try it out. This was a quick read that focuses on trauma and abuse and how we recover and grow. There is so much pain but yet so much beauty in all of these poems.
• 
  Liz Mc2

  Oof. Very good and very painful.
• 
  BookChampions

  Love poems, heartbreak poems, poems about abuse and forgiveness, poems about healing. So good, all.
• 
  Darius Stewart

  Re-reading this book when the sun is in Scorpio hits different...man, beautiful and brutal, awful and astonishing...
• 
  Robin

  Let us be ocean and coast, a taking
  into and over one another:
  shifting sediment, a breaking down
  
  of rock: dredge and deposit.
• 
  Susie Dumond

  The Renunciations is a powerful ode to resilience and drawing boundaries of the self while recovering from trauma. It’s heartbreaking, but also brings hope in the form of healing remembrance. Donika Kelly shows incredible vulnerability, vision, and sheer brilliance in this collection, and I will absolutely read more of her work.
  
  Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
• 
  Natalie Park

  4.5 stars
• 
  Stephanie

  The first poem has most of the lines redacted, which I haven't seen in a book of poetry before. When I think of redacted text, I think of someone trying to hide something—usually intelligence agencies because something is classified. When writing about a subject matter so traumatic—like sexual abuse—it's an interesting choice to redact the text. It's a way of protecting oneself and who wants to relive the details. But it also protects the perpetrator. There are several redacted poems in the book, but the speaker uses that device or technique less by the end of the collection. Time is another way the collection is organized, from past to present. As we get closer to the present, more details are revealed. Maybe that means the speaker has reached some kind of resolution or understanding about what happened? But I'm not sure that means forgiveness? This is one of those books that made me feel uncomfortable, and maybe that's what I'm supposed to feel when reading about sexual abuse. I feel weird saying I liked it (or that it's a 4 star book) because of the subject matter. But the writer is doing something new and this is a subject that people need to hear about.
• 
  Peycho Kanev

  Mounting Dead Butterflies Is Not Hard
  
  My child hunger, my child body, all need—
  arch and alpha and shameless in the dark—
  ground against any nearly hard thing:
  
  faces of my stuffed animals, girl
  cousins, my own hardening bones, breathless
  and panting in the hunt for my own slick
  
  pleasure. I say shameless when I mean unshamed,
  my parents’ failure to curb to bind to strike
  each nasty act, my wild hunt. Unshameable
  
  until my father
  mounted me, an insect
  pinned to the walls, the kitchen tile.
  
  I say my father.
  I say wall and tile.
  
  I say mount.
  I say me.
  
  I keep looking away.
  
  Better the dried wing, dried ganglia,
  useless nerve cord. Better the small body
  
  in the boiled water, disinfected and softened
  in the airtight container of the poem.
  
  Better the wings pinned between corkboard
  and paper, dried again in a warm room,
  
  ready to be mounted under glass
  with a pin through the thorax.
  
  Better that than to remember,
  even once, what shames me:
  
  my child brain and mammal body, my
  hunting hips, my face in my father’s neck.
• 
  Taylor

  "I promised no new doors / into my body. // I promised a body free / of fossils buried in the house / like the rings of a tree--" Partial Hospitalization
  
  One day, I hope to be able to write poems like Donika Kelly. This collection expands upon and complicates the poems in her first collection Bestiary. There are a lot of interesting themes including: apologies, grief, forgiveness, love, (found) family, growth. I found the motif of apology to be the most compelling. I was particularly struck by the erasure poems which have no specific source text. What is unsaid is as important as what is. This collection deals with a lot of types of heartache. I'm always so impressed with Kelly's ability to discuss the same topic in new interesting ways. I loved every poem but especially Hymn, The Oracle, and The Last Time.
  
  thanks to netgalley for the ARC!