Abloom & Awry

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Tina Kelley

In Abloom & Awry, Tina Kelley praises strange truths and windshield dings. With the eye of a journalist and the heart of a caretaker, she shares her love of words, fireworks, kites, sea salt caramels, metaphor, and humans. Armed with a generative impulse, her poems pay close attention to the dark, moving through it with wit and affirmation.

Tina Kelley’s fourth poetry collection, Rise Wildly, was released in 2020 by CavanKerry Press, which also published Abloom and Awry (2017). Ardor won the Jacar Press 2017 chapbook competition. Her other books are Precise (Word Press), and The Gospel of Galore, winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and was a reporter forThe New York Times for a decade, sharing in a staff Pulitzer for coverage of the 9/11 attacks. She wrote 121 “Portraits of Grief,” short descriptions of the victims, and many stories about oppression: the health problems of a Native American tribe living near a Superfund site, a high school student who challenged a proselytizing public school teacher and who received a death threat for his stance, a transgender vocational school principal in a rural town, and the lives of children waiting to be adopted out of foster care. Her journalism has appeared in Orion, Audubon, and People magazines, and her poetry has appeared in Poetry East, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Poetry, and on the buses of Seattle. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.

The title of Tina Kelley’s new book, Abloom and Awry, promises a richness of language within, witty, authentic, and profound. That promise is fulfilled on page after page. In addition to her acute attention to the earth and the interconnectedness of its life, Kelley brings her energy and originality to the world of parent and child, the body and wonder of the experience, the first child, the second. She presents the unrestrained curiosity and imagination of childhood in her own exquisite language without exaggeration or sentimentality. The tradition of English poetry is enriched by such a voice.
– Pattiann Rogers,
The Grand Array, Song of the World Becoming, Firekeeper

Tina Kelley is a good poet for the same reasons she was a good reporter – she asks good questions, she picks up vivid details. Above all, she pays attention. As a result, reading Kelley is like having an attention implant; edges are sharper, colors more vivid, meanings finer-honed.

Since it’s a fallen world, Kelley can skin you and salt you and nail you to the barn door when she imagines her way into the pain of others, whether as real as children in a shelter or as fictional as Peter Pan’s abandoned mother Pamela. But praise is her first language, and praise is what these poems deserve.
– Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for A Mind Like This

April 2017
108 pp
Trade paper – 8.5 X 8.5
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-61-7
Florenz Eisman Book Series

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