In the Cathedral of My Undoing

by Kellam Ayres

Is this smalltown America? A place where the air doesn’t move, love is thin, beer fails nightly to do its trick, and hope rides a cloud to the edge of town, then disappears? These poems are located further east than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but they offer the same story of lives where the dramas are small, their significance large, the outcome of disappointments seemingly permanent. Here is art, here is truth, poems as portraits.
--Gary Soto, final judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize

80 pages, Paperback

Published February 5, 2024

About the author

Kellam Ayres’s debut poetry collection, IN THE CATHEDRAL OF MY UNDOING, was selected by Gary Soto as the winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (Gunpowder Press, 2024) and was a finalist for the 2024 New England Book Awards and the 2024 Vermont Book Awards. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Guernica, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Her work has received support with grants and residencies from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Studio Center. She works for the Middlebury College Library and serves as the liaison to the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. She’s a graduate of both the School of English and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and lives with her family in Vermont.

Reviews

[Stephen Kiernan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If James Dickey and Sharon Olds had a daughter, these are the poems she would write: muscular, frank about difficult matters, rich for the senses, written with a courage that is half heartbreak and half steel.
All this, no less, in a debut book. I continue to maintain that the best writing happening in Vermont right now is coming from female poets.
Nearly all the poems take place in an unnamed rural setting, where people with more dreams than money buy collapsing farmhouses to repair, where love has a few drinks and sometimes is rough, where sex has sounds and smells and lessons for the unwary.
The Old Mill echoes with Dickey's masterwork, Cherrylog Road. The untitled poems that begin "We couldn't stop ourselves" and "We were in worse shape than I thought" are full of surprises and turns that nonetheless feel inevitable. Even a backyard, with the dog let out, can say something true and exquisite about vulnerability.
Buy this book. It will move your heart.