Bestiary

by Donika Kelly

Overview

Donika Kelly's fierce debut collection, longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought myself body enough for two, for we.
Found comfort in never being lonely.

What burst from my back, from my bones, what lived along the ridge from crown to crown, from mane to forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamor

we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble at the splitting, at the horns and beard,
at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back.

What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie are we. What we've made of ourselves.

—from "Love Poem: Chimera"

Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters—half human and half something else. Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures—from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from "Out West" to "Back East." Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977580
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	182,388
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Donika Kelly is a poet and a scholar, and is currently a lecturer in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. Her poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, and West Branch.

Table of Contents

Introduction Nikky Finney ix

Out West 3

Catalogue 7

Fourth Grade Autobiography 8

Where she is opened Where she is closed 9

Love Poem: Chimera 10

Bower 11

Hermit Thrush 12

Bower 13

Self-Portrait as a Block of Ice 14

Bower 15

Self-Portrait as a Door 16

Swallow 17

Love Poem: Pegasus 18

Handsome is 19

How to be alone 20

Whale 36

Ceremony at the end of a season 37

Ostrich 38

Arkansas Love Song 39

A man goes west and falls off his horse in the desert 40

Love Poem: Centaur 41

Secretary 42

Love Poem: centaur 43

Love Poem: Satyr 44

Balloon 45

Love Poem: Mermaid 46

Love letter 47

Love Poem: Werewolf 48

Little Box 49

Self-Portrait as a Wooden Flower 51

Commandments 52

Love Poem: Griffon 53

Archaeology 55

Tender 56

Winter Poem 57

Love Poem: Donika 58

Red Bird 59

What Gay Porn Has Done for Me 60

Sonnet in which only one bird appears 61

Love Poem: Minotaur 62

Santa Rosa 63

Love Poem 64

Back East 67

Editorial Reviews

Kelly is a descendant of Sylvia Plath by way of the wintry Louise Glück—her poems are animated by roiling, mostly dark emotion, but they're spare, composed and often quite short…The tone ranges from guardedly tender…to self-critical…to almost clinically brutal…Her diction is just formal enough to give her lines an appealing unnaturalness…The fantastical creatures in Bestiary are almost all hybrids—mermaids, minotaurs, griffins—as opposed to mere monsters, and their in-betweenness calls attention equally to the danger of dissolution and the possibility of unity. Kelly is drawn to both outcomes, and her uncertainty gives her writing its peculiar magnetism. If a few poems here seem slight, or too willfully autobiographical, that is a small price to pay for the possibilities her work suggests. Because possibility, perhaps even more than accomplishment, is what we want from first books; it is the foundation from which a career begins its brick-by-brick rise.

The New York Times Book Review - David Orr

★ 10/03/2016
In her astounding debut, Kelly, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Prize, catalogs creatures familiar and mythical as she turns monsters into recognizable portraits of humankind . The poems employ language that sinks its teeth in at vulnerable moments, easily piercing the tenderest spots: “Freedom is a thread of light snaking/ the canyon like an ant through a conch.” Despite the collection’s eponymous grounding theme, Kelly doesn’t strictly use mythology to teach a moral lesson. She sets the tone with “Catalogue,” outlining with care the anxiety and excitement of growing up: “You grow. You are large./ You are a 19th century poem./ All of America is inside you.” Poems such as “Fourth Grade Autobiography” explore childhood memories with precision and clarity. Kelly’s speaker recalls flashes of neighborhood parties at a time when youthful innocence starts to crack. “My favorite things are cartwheels, salted plums,/ and playing catch with my dad,” she writes. “I am afraid/ of riots and falling and the dark.” The compact scenes of the poem “How to Be Alone” burn like a hot knife to an open wound; the speaker’s loneliness becomes armor in the wake of her mother’s death and father’s violent transgressions. Kelly’s creatures howl and whimper as she imparts emotional truths: “Love,/ I pound the Earth for you. I pound the Earth.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Striking. . . . Kelly is a descendant of Sylvia Plath by way of the wintry Louise Glück — her poems are animated by roiling, mostlydark emotion, but they’re spare, composed and often quite short. . . . The fantastical creatures in Bestiary are almost all hybrids— mermaids, minotaurs, griffins — as opposed to mere monsters, and their in-betweenness calls attention equally to the danger ofdissolution and the possibility of unity. Kelly is drawn to both outcomes, and her uncertainty gives her writing its peculiar magnetism.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[An] astounding debut. . . . The poems employ language that sinks its teeth in at vulnerable moments. . . . Kelly’s creatures howl and whimper as she imparts emotional truths.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Magic possesses this book, the kind that transforms objects and ideas and the knowledge we thought we knew, so thoroughly that Kelly seems to speak a new language.”—Ploughshares

“Spend only a minute or two in Donika Kelly’s poetry, and you’ll almost begin to feel your body moving along with the rhythm of her writing. Her lines pound, and declare, and expose and challenge — and often explore the gendered experiences of our world.”—Bustle

“Kelly’s rich, devastating, interior landscapes map the reader across a persona’s mutation through emotional stages. . . . In Bestiary memory has legs, wings and fins, and cannot be drowned.”—The Wilds

“The poems in Kelly’s Bestiary are incredibly precise, tight without feeling constrained, with a looseness that almost defies such a density and precision.”—Rob McLennan’s Blog

“What a gorgeous book of poems. The love poems, in particular, are striking with unexpected ideas and imagery coalescing into poetry about this thing called love. . . . This one, I savored.”—Roxane Gay, Goodreads

“Bestiary is an act of transformation. . . . But it is a true act, also, because it acknowledges that a human will hide to be seen, and look back. These poems—among the best being written by any young poet in America—look back.”—Shane McCrae

“Donika Kelly whistles and crows her book into a psalm of pure resolve. And in the end, no mythology remains. Everything is singed and true. . . . Bestiary’s lesson is complicated and also simple. Love can be hunted down.”—Nikky Finney, from her introduction

From the Publisher

01/01/2017
Winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Kelly's first collection touches on animals legendary, half-human, and otherwise. "A strong choice for most collections." (LJ 11/1/16)

Library Journal