Book: Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary
Ahsahta Press, 2006
“‘…to love the world our words made?’ Kelsey builds us a world here as a painter might—based on colors, vivid and free-floating—and she populates that world with birds and gardens and a sense of delicate, indeterminate destruction. And so she rebuilds. This book is a lovely feat, a triumph over eroding forces and the proof that resistance can be graceful, compassionate, and above all, adventurous. We see it in her page arrangements and hear it in her weave of sounds; it runs all through the book and lets us glimpse from time to time ‘through a crack in the sky, the mind.’”—Cole Swensen
From “Flood/Fold: Aperture 3”
Halting into the mouth I thought
the image of the bird would sing but it wouldn’t
though the mouth says I am content now with domestic things
the sound of the broom on the floor body moving
the way a woman’s body has been seen moving
a simpler song and more sweet some would say when heard or read
as the birds wake and there is no reason for waking oneself
on a day like this beginning in curtain light and oranges.
