Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

Karla Kelsey

Selected for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Carolyn Forché

“As consciousness turns out to be nothing less than one infinity surrounding every thought, so here, ‘Marked/ by the spaces,’ poetry proves to be an infinite, tender inundation of our syllables by love, by grace expansive and underway. Karla Kelsey is a poet of a knowledge given wings of a dove. I honestly believe these poems will lift us.”—Donald Revell

“These poems rise up at the crucial turn from phenomenon to language and exquisitely reveal the debris shimmering in the corners during and after the ricochet. What happens, as word and world fold into each other and blend or shatter? The possible names for the bird flower beneath the word for the bird. Kelsey’s mind lovingly polishes the world's objects into these gorgeous, gleaming things.”—Eleni Sikelianos

“‘...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