Margins
The Renunciations book cover
The Renunciations
Poems
2021
First Published
4.29
Average Rating
72
Number of Pages

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.”

Avg Rating
4.29
Number of Ratings
880
5 STARS
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2 STARS
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Author

Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly
Author · 3 books
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.
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