Spill

by Kelle Groom

In these extraordinary new poems, Kelle Groom rejects consolation in favor of an expanding definition of love. Groom, who has published in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, confronts the face of mortality and political/cultural crisis in Spill. Her answer is love in every from a homeless shelter in Orlando to a halfway house run by the holy girls of Blackpool, Ireland, to Croatian students dressing her in white, ''a wedding dress.'' Her luminous language is both witness and incantation, in poems that range from Steve McQueen and her young father, to 2,000 snow geese falling from the sky, a sleep disorder clinic, and just-hatched turtles. As Nick Flynn noted, ''This book is an offering, an attempt to capture the quicksilver nature of consciousness, of what it's like to move through our world of burdens and joys.'' Spill is a call to live, to fill with light.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published October 10, 2017

About the author

Kelle Groom is a poet and memoirist. Her memoir, "I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl," is forthcoming from The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster in June 2011. She is the author of three poetry collections: "Five Kingdoms" (Anhinga Press, 2010); "Luckily" (Anhinga, 2006); and "Underwater City" (University Press of Florida, 2004). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2010, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others, and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize 2010 and Best American Non-Required Reading 2007 anthologies. She is the recipient of both a 2010 and a 2006 Florida Book Award and grant awards from the State of Florida, Division of Cultural Affairs, New Forms Florida, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Groom has been a Norma Millay Ellis Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts, a William Randolph Hearst Foundation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and has been awarded residency fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught writing at the University of Central Florida and is a contributing editor for The Florida Review.
Kelle Groom website: http://www.KelleGroom.com
Kelle Groom facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/IWoretheOcean...

Reviews

[T.J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Kelly Groom. I think I have all of her poetry collections and her wonderful memoir. And while I found some of the poems in "Spill" to be impenetrable, she always executes a mood I can drift away in. Looking forward to her next book.