Hi, everyone.
Hi.
OK, we all have to take our seats now.
Thank you.
It's really good to be here with everyone
after such a long stretch of so many things.
We have books for sale; they're right over here.
We have Donika Kelly's The Renunciations and Bestiary.
And for every book that you buy, we also
are offering-- through the Poetry Center,
through our partnerships with PEN America
as part of the Art for Justice Initiative,
you'll receive a book: The Sentences That Create Us:
Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison,
edited by Caits Meissner, and the foreword is written
by Reginald Dwayne Betts, who you know
has been really instrumental in our work
here against mass incarceration.
So you could pick up Donika's book,
and then you would walk away with this book too.
So just a reminder, yes.
I want to remind everyone just of two things.
The first is that Sesshu Foster is
going to be here next week, April 14, on Thursday at 7:00.
If you don't know Sesshu's work, he's from LA.
He wrote City Terrace Field Manual and just
a whole bunch of other seminal books
about LA, about Chicanos, and just about the Aztec empire.
His work is really amazing, and it's
hybrid and interdisciplinary and braided.
So they will be here next Thursday.
The other thing I want to say and remind
everyone about-- because I forgot to do this--
was to introduce myself.
So Diana Delgado, the literary director here at Poetry Center.
Really happy to be here with everyone.
Yeah!
[CHEERING]
I feel really excited because we've been doing the readings,
and it's been so cold.
And I think this is the first time
that I've done the reading where I'm able to wear a skirt
and just sort of be Arizonian and wear sandals and stuff.
And I'm just glad to do that.
I have the honor tonight to introduce Donika Kelly.
I recently read, The mind is in every cell of the body,
and considering this, I thought, where then does pain reside?
And considering this, I thought, well,
what is the afterlife of that pain, and does it have a shape?
And what, if any, vibration does it make?
And how does a poet trace this anguish?
Anguish that we all feel at some point in our lives.
But only the most courageous of us
dare to approach and bear each time
to touch it, transforming that and those emotions surrounding
to create meaning, much in the way that miscreate
meaning, meaning that changes us.
I often don't read poetry to heal, nor do I write to heal.
In fact, I seek out and need the poet that
stands with the poisoned arrow in their heart,
and despite this traumatic obligation and tragic discord,
they sing.
Poets who will, standing on and in their words,
ascend beyond the event and/or events
that have befriended them to touch the wound despite,
despite, and despite.
Donika Kelly is that poet, if not the poet,
who, after being stunned by said arrow, declares,
everything is stardust.
Everything is essential.
This is brujería.
It is the witchcraft of gathering and weaving together
the collected strands of our existence,
even those strands that would normally be cast out.
The Renunciations is an effort to be whole,
but it is not an effort to be perfect.
So that after the self's death and rebirth,
the self now majusculated, standing, with a capital S,
declares, did you know you can throw a star?
This is an epic about reincarnation, about the body,
mind, heart, and soul in the face of that which is lost,
that which is given, and that which cannot be taken away.
Throughout the book, the speaker summons her elements,
the sweet and bittersweet lands of LA, of the seas,
summoning the power of the ancestors,
family constellation tasked with telling.
This is what happened to me.
This is what happened, and it is still in me.
It is a book of constant making and unmaking rooted in myth
where Kelly, omniscient in the best way,
is ancient as a storyteller, suspender of disbelief,
who, after you've closed the book, continues to whisper,
the trees were all women once.
It is with great humility and honor
that I introduce to you Donika Kelly.
Kelly is an assistant professor of English specializing
in poetry writing and gender studies
in contemporary American literature
at the University of Iowa.
She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium,
published with 500 Places in 2017,
and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.
She also just recently won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
for the book Renunciations, and one of the judges
cited her book as, "I return to Kelly's book,
and she's sent me gasping anew.
This is poetry of the highest order."
Everyone, please welcome Donika Kelly.
[APPLAUSE]