Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice. I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer
Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.” I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity. I
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.
