The poems are rich and varied, with incredible voice and image. I will say that the format here made these harder to see and enjoy than it should have been-- titles and line breaks were hard to follow.

The Renunciations is a powerful ode to resilience and drawing boundaries of the self while recovering from trauma. It’s heartbreaking, but also brings hope in the form of healing remembrance. Donika Kelly shows incredible vulnerability, vision, and sheer brilliance in this collection, and I will absolutely read more of her work.

Emotion is skillfully rendered in these thoughtful poems, which is far less common in the genre than should be assumed. Kelly's poetry is frank and earnest; at times it seems even impossibly honest. This collection deserves to be treasured, and will be by many.

“Even an oracle / cannot choose what or how / to remember.”
- The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided

Donika Kelly has done it again, folks. A big fan of her first collection “Bestiary,” I was thrilled to receive an ARC of her newest collection “The Renunciations” from NetGalley and was not disappointed. Kelly’s collection builds on the foundations laid in Bestiary, continuing similar themes and exploring new ones. The narrative arc of the work, too, is striking. Divided into sections “Now” “Then” “Now / Then” and “After,” the script flips between the idea of the speaker’s childhood and a failing marriage. From love poems full of aching tenderness towards an increasingly absent partner to poems grappling with the idea of worship, inheritance, and abuse to poems making apologies by the handfuls, this collection is one that will stick with me for a very long time.

3.5/4 stars This poetry collection took me a little while to get into, but I ended up enjoying it. The second half stood out to me more than the first. The layers behind Donika Kelly's voice grow deeper over time and I found myself intrigued in her use of metaphors such as an ominous oracle, trees, and eggs, as ways to process trauma and hopefully foster healing. She utilizes text in interesting ways in unaddressed letters, empty brackets, and blacked out passages. I was definitely intrigued by Kelly's work and at times longed for additional lines and pages to feel more immersed in her world. Thanks to Graywolf Press and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

Donika Kelly is truly a phenomenal poet. This collection translates trauma, communicates its tenderness and vast energy as they move through love and ache. The language is soft--it never hits aggressively with sharp phonetics and form--just letting the words rotate in and around themselves to become. The areas in tracking generational trauma and harm to how that transmits itself into the poet's trauma ripples outward this desirous need to heal and attempt to heal in the searching for the words. There is love and tenderness just wrapped and layered into each poem presented and there isn't much more I can say about it. It something to be experienced just as I feel about all poems and collections. A remarkable collection.

Damn. This collection is stunning, in the figurative but also somewhat the literal sense. I don't have the language to describe what Donika Kelly has done here, but it's awe-inspiring. (As noted in the book's description, it does deal with massively traumatic subject matter, particularly childhood sexual abuse, at length.) The best poetry collection I've read this year, for sure.

I'm floored by this collection. Donika Kelly has put together a clear narrative in poetic form - these poems sometimes have the sensibility of a memoir or lyric essay, as they reflect back, and look forward simultaneously. Many of these poems interrogate Kelly's complicated history with her own sexual abuse in childhood - and those pieces are heartbreaking. I'm certainly not one to cry at poems, but the strain and hurt found in these pages is compelling and hard to ignore. Besides the content itself, Kelly handles rhythm with a unique hand - there is so much internal rhyme used subtly to press the reader on to the most urgent, demanding poems. She also uses erasure creatively and sparingly - important, one might think, for a collection where the speaker seeks constantly to reclaim an erased self. This is probably my favorite collection of poetry that I've read in the past year.

Stunning. I loved Kelly's first collection and this one blew me away as well. There's a formal quality to her poems that makes the surprising places they go, the twists and turns of language and meaning, even more striking. Will be coming back to this collection over and over again for sure.

"I promised no new doors / into my body. // I promised a body free / of fossils buried in the house / like the rings of a tree--" Partial Hospitalization

One day, I hope to be able to write poems like Donika Kelly. This collection expands upon and complicates the poems in her first collection Bestiary. There are a lot of interesting themes including: apologies, grief, forgiveness, love, (found) family, growth. I found the motif of apology to be the most compelling. I was particularly struck by the erasure poems which have no specific source text. What is unsaid is as important as what is. This collection deals with a lot of types of heartache. I'm always so impressed with Kelly's ability to discuss the same topic in new interesting ways. I loved every poem but especially Hymn, The Oracle, and The Last Time.