As a hummingbird beats its wings so that it might be still to feed on a flower the poet concludes, “The equation keeps balancing out, and / I’m drawn to how it does not settle.” Aware of the difficulty of loving the world while feeding upon it, the poems of Dwelling Song hope vision is levity as they press language to make sight and song. This writing is a form of mimicry yet an act of dangerous flight. Whether from the voice of a hunter, shepherd, farmer, or bugle-blowing boy on a city street, the song recognizes that moving forward necessitates turning one’s back.

Dwelling Song: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Keith, Sally

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for PoetryPublished by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Design (Colorado Prize for Poetry)

Center for Literary Publishing

Moving from the mundane to the profound, first through observation of fact and matter, then shifting perspective, engaging a deeper sense of self, these poems re-imagine things great and small, making us care deeply about the world around us. In this cultivated and intricately crafted collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of forcethat which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Force by which a line unfurlsas in Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jettyor leads with forward motiona train hurdling along the west-reaching railroad; Edweard Muybridge’s photographic reels charting animal and human locomotion. With poems remarkable in their clarity, captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world, meanwhile negotiating an inexorable pull toward the places we call homeone we alternately try and fail to resist.

The Fact of the Matter: Poems

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

These are poems of absence. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured. Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be filled with this unexpected feeling of living.”

River House: Poems

Genre Fiction

Two of Everything: Poems