BESTIARY was released in October of 2016 by Graywolf Press and has garnered a great deal of praise, including being longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry. Kelly was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email regarding the notion of self in poetry, how trauma and grief can manifest in art, and how her critical work informs (or fails to inform) her poetry.

She can't remember the important bad things. I ask her about the divorces and the dead dogs buried in the woods and the cracks in the bathroom tile and the negative, blood red balance in her checking account and her eyes go blank and she shakes her head like she's been overcome by some faint neurological chill. 

I have watched too much reality TV about Kimye and teen mothers. This is why I cannot explain April like a normal person.

I came at reading this book as I do most things. Like a fool. I expected what the cover hinted at. A memoir. Some casual retelling of Norm's life. I expected quaint takes of rural Canadian life

you wore a shirt with balloons on it, drank whiskey, stood in front of a mirror, had violent ideation

She says she had a dream about bodies packed together, blue & bruised & left to bleed. 

In memory, we wanted to repost this gem from 2014 by Amanda Goldblatt that used Mary Tyler Moore as a lens to become a "review of friendship."

As a houseguest, I sucked. I acted like I was doing them a favor by living there, but in reality I would have been destitute without their hospitality.

I've been a Kevin Wilson fan since his debut story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, first found it's way into my hands, one way or another. I've been reading and re-reading the

if I could re-wire myself I would
start again a blank heart with no pictures

i bought an essay with someone else’s money when i was 23
just to feel what it was like to steal words
it was the sickest i’ve ever been

“They were getting ‘the talk,’” Carmen says, pausing dramatically, “and in walks a huge nurse wearing a robe.”

Looking back, the efforts we made were desperate. We took walks. In bed, he fed me grapes; chilled, out of the refrigerator. We took weekends off work, spending money in small towns where there was

The moon is small and perfectly cut.
Blinking between trees like the cursor
you used on your middle school blog.

Later that evening, when confronted about my absence, I told her that my grandfather said I looked sick and should go home. His senility always made him my reliable scapegoat.

Miracles come more seldom now.
It’s satellite interference.

Ribbit

...the products we couldn't get here. They'd come home with stories of innocent smiles given to bored border guards while they wore two pairs of jeans under three dresses. The trunk of their car filled with Cherry Coke and flavours of chips we couldn't comprehend. Cheap rum. Meat. Cigarettes. Electronics. 

In the far-flung depths of the future, historians
will look back to this day and say, "This
is where it all went wrong."

This was the “Year of the Whopper”:          
I ate a Whopper.
I ate a Whopper.
You dumped me.

Going big on tsk tsk.

There’s something about a horse that floats.
Watch her neck hover over the half-door
of a stall, or her sunlit backside rise

my brain is on fire
so i can tell by the colors
that winter is coming