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Felling (Volume 31)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 5, 2024
Goat talk
January 5, 2026
Hands down one of the best poetry collections I've read over the past few years.
Nee's writing style is tight, sparse, and direct, yet it's also more eloquent and imagistic than other poets who write in similar ways. It's hard to put a finger on it, but you are able to somehow feel the grit, the hurt, and the pain that went into his writing, almost like I could picture Nee sitting at some darkened desk late in the evening while he worked on these poems after a long day of manual labor, his bones and soul heavy with a sense of anguish.
Nee touches on many, many dark subjects--suicide, loss of loved ones, living with drug and alcohol addictions, getting sober--and as someone who recently also decided to turn sober after 14.5 years of abusing alcohol, it all hit home in a very personal way.
His poetry is very accessible, deeply salt-of-the-earth, and excessively readable. He, to me at least, is the literary equivalent of what you'd get if you tossed Donald Hall, Charles Bukowski, Jim Harrison, and Linda Pastan into a blender and then sprinkled sawdust on top of everything. Nee is only 30, and I hope he has a very long and very prolific career ahead of him.
Nee's writing style is tight, sparse, and direct, yet it's also more eloquent and imagistic than other poets who write in similar ways. It's hard to put a finger on it, but you are able to somehow feel the grit, the hurt, and the pain that went into his writing, almost like I could picture Nee sitting at some darkened desk late in the evening while he worked on these poems after a long day of manual labor, his bones and soul heavy with a sense of anguish.
Nee touches on many, many dark subjects--suicide, loss of loved ones, living with drug and alcohol addictions, getting sober--and as someone who recently also decided to turn sober after 14.5 years of abusing alcohol, it all hit home in a very personal way.
His poetry is very accessible, deeply salt-of-the-earth, and excessively readable. He, to me at least, is the literary equivalent of what you'd get if you tossed Donald Hall, Charles Bukowski, Jim Harrison, and Linda Pastan into a blender and then sprinkled sawdust on top of everything. Nee is only 30, and I hope he has a very long and very prolific career ahead of him.
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July 31, 2024Kelan Nee has deservedly won the 2023 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Coincidentally, I enjoyed the first poem in this collection (maybe because I heard Kelan read it) and the last best. Kelan has a good command of language for rendering his physical labors, carpentry, husbandry. My only complaint—and can I complain about someone’s repeated expression of the trauma they’ve experienced, or their efforts to make sense of it?— was that the repeated references to wanton drugging, and loveless sex grew strained. Yes, read these poems. They are powerful, moving. Keep the book on an end table and read one, say, once a week.
July 30, 2025
Genuinely the strangified language in this + the “straightforward” language + the introspection!!! Such a great book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews