Poetry. This book, winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, takes flight from Plato's Theaetetus, in which Socrates tells us that the mind works as an aviary--particles of knowledge fly around like birds, and the thinker plucks them down to use when he or she sees fit. The bird becomes a metaphor for the action of the mind folding and unfolding into explosions and navigational patterns of flight. Lyrical and thought-provoking, it is a masterful debut. "Kelsey writes what it is to know, of 'what we become/ when the universe is seen in lights of its generation.' We are, in this work, in the midst of things, and as Plato's Socrates has it, 'the eye becomes filled with vision and now sees, and becomes, not vision but a seeing eye.'"--Carolyn Forche.

Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

Literature & Fiction

Kelsey, Karla

Poetry

Ahsahta Press

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. A lyric meditation on affect, relationality, and environment, OF SPHERE conjures a self and world that both bloom and fall apart. Given this continually unfastening attempt to make a cosmos—to equip, adorn, dress, ornament—what is it to know, and love, and be? In constellation with the experimental prose of writers such as Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector, and H.D., the book investigates ways a woman, aware she's always becoming gendered, might resist sealing into a character according to cultural norms. How to be wind through goldenrod. Clarity streaked with berry juice.

Of Sphere

Essays & Correspondence

Essay Press

On Certainty

Omnidawn

Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book hinges together two texts―Aftermath and Become Tree, Become Bird―to create a meditation on the nature of aboutness. Aftermath unfolds after an unnamed ecological/emotional fracture, creating a landscape of rift where the “I” imagines herself as “she,” and perceptions weave into memory and fiction. Become Tree, Become Bird grafts the Brothers Grimm’s The Juniper Tree to the body of Aftermath, reworking what has splintered into a variation of fairy tale. Throughout A Conjoined Book, Kelsey’s condensed imagery, shifting viewpoints, and interwoven formal structures set lyric and narrative a-shimmer. Blending experiment and tradition, this book will appeal to a wide audience interested in seeing how fairy tale, philosophy, ecology, narratology, history. As Julie Carr writes: “horror, elegy, mystery, fairy tale, lyric, treatise, fragment meet one another with all their intensities of emotion and intellect.”

A Conjoined Book: Aftermath and Become Tree, Become Bird

Poetry. Karla Kelsey begins with the sonnet--fourteen lines (usually!) that she's appropriated from a variety of sources, homophonically echoed, and playfully assembled. She then explodes each sonnet into a voluptuous prose poem, later erasing that into a sinuous, open lyric line. The aim of the book is not to execute a plan or fulfill a form, but to generate new modes of inhabiting a poem. The result is a work of lyrical constraint and romantic conceptualism.

Iteration Nets

Poetry. An actress. A thinker. A filmmaker. Built of archives and the imagination, the three fictive women narrating BLOOD FEATHER articulate a feminist philosophy of art-making and life-making for our fractured world. Kelsey engages the given by calling on female artists of the past--Lilian Gish, Maya Deren, Maria Tallchief, and the architect Eileen Gray, among others--to join this drama of character and form. Here, structures of the past and ambitions for our future shape BLOOD FEATHER'S personae as they confirm and resist, collude with and attempt to reinvent, the cultural and personal histories that surround them.

Blood Feather

History & Criticism

Tupelo Press

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