The path to her words wasn’t an apparent one growing up, though. Oh, and her first poetry collection, the award-winning Bestiary, was reviewed by the New York Times last month, to acclaim. Not to mention the instructional and professorial career since 2005.
The “Fellowships & Honors” and “Poetry Publications” sections of Donika’s CV are enough to make even the ‘busiest’ of us feel just a wee bit guilty for that day/week/month we spent embroiled in that Law & Order marathon. It’s a boon for us and the region’s literary community that Donika landed squarely in Western New York last year, however. I was excited and also kind of unsure – this is a really different place from the other places I’ve lived,” said the 33-year-old poet and professor. Bonaventure University, and they were very excited about the possibility of me joining the faculty. A dip back into California for a year (faculty, Santa Clara University University of California, Davis), and now…Olean, New York. Then it was off to Texas for three years (MFA, University of Texas at Austin), then Nashville for seven (MA, PhD, Vanderbilt University). She then moved to Arkansas where she attended high school and college (BA, Arkansas University). How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself: to claim her own barking voice, to revel in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers woven into the cyclone fence.Donika Kelly was born in Los Angeles and lived there until she was 13. Can you see her? She is lead to the gates that separate the wounded sea lions from their home and the class. I might ask you to imagine a young girl, no older than ten but also no younger, on a field trip to a rescue. Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned.
#Donika nallbani moneyhouse how to
How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer. I call this the difficulty of the non-believer, or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god. This is a prayer like the sea urchin is a prayer, like the sea star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber- as if I know what prayer means. The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing point, something brown breaks the surface-human, maybe, a hand or foot or an island of trash-but no, it's just a garden of kelp. The tide pool crumples like a woman into the smallest version of herself, bleeding onto whatever touches her.
But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black and green, spilling their bile onto whatever's left, sweeping the interior, drinking it clean? I think, something might have grown there, though I know it was always meant to be eaten, it was always meant to spoil.
#Donika nallbani moneyhouse cracked
What I wanted: a practice that reassured that what was cracked could be mended or, at least, suspended so that it could not spread. Better to begin as if some small-handed animal hadn't knocked you against a rock, licked clean the rich yolk and left the albumen to dry in the sun - as if a hinged jaw hadn't swallowed you whole. Best to start again, with a new body, voided from a warmer one, brooded and turned. A curious phrase, the anatomy of the egg, as if an egg were a body, which it is, as if the egg could be broken then mended, which, depending on your faith, broken yes, but mended? Well. I've been thinking about the anatomy of the egg, about the two interior membranes, the yolk held in place by the chalazae, gases moving through the semipermeable shell. A Dead Thing That, in Dying, Feeds the Living
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