Coming to Love My Darkest Places

"How could I stand to be so dim where the light couldn't reach me" asks the speaker in one of the opening poems of Jennifer Kelley's debut, Coming to Love My Darkest Places. With a fine-bone intellect and a crystalline voice, the poems in Kelley's collection interrogate this question more deeply with each page. Like the bouts of epilepsy described in the first section of the book, Kelley's work arises out of affliction-the feelings of being overtaken, stricken, possessed, in this case by addiction, mental disorder, and the reverberations of abuse. But the alchemy of the poems is to transform suffering into tenderness, loss into vision, grief into acceptance. At center, the book explores timeless questions of suffering, redemption, and the divine. "We cannot claim the infinite," Kelley writes. And this is the essence of these poems: Divinity is not something one acquires. Rather, the infinite is found in everyday wonder, the overlooked images, the contour of an interior life, accessed in these poems by the poet's honesty, humility, and stunning powers of observation.

-Kim Young

"In these stutter-stop times" Jennifer reaches into landscapes of belief and love and creation. She explicates our duplicities and our evasions. With honesty and with a poet's pungence. She not only reveals who she is, she reveals who we all are. I travel with her. It is a comfort.

-Ann Buxie

With these poems, Jennifer Kelley masterfully addresses the struggle of who she is and what it has taken for her to be here. "I want to shrink / and grow at the same time. / And I couldn't be a noose, not with Jesus watching." Coming to Love My Darkest Places is a poetic journey of what acceptance is and the struggle to claim an identity that is outside of what is okay. "An atmosphere/ of hope and wish / of bait and switch / of swing and miss." Kelley lets us in on this journey of what it takes to negotiate, survive and grow in this world where everyone is supposed to be the same. "Ancient and full of dreams, we talk only about the weather." In this tome, the poet claims and reclaims her voice. These poems are strong, sometimes funny, well written, and vulnerable. Kelley's work is both beautiful and stark. The poems in Coming to Love My Darkest Places tell us they are here with us in this world. In this realm of poetry. They struggle towards joy.

-Phil Taggart