Going out of Business by Kelsey Campbell
$13.99
These poems have a careful, strange, subdued music that makes them seem almost ghostly, yet they are actually quite vivid and deeply felt. They get beneath the reader’s skin and simmer there. This is a fine debut by a talented young poet.
–Mark Cox
In Kelsey Campbell‘s first collection of poems, Going out of Business, she writes vignettes of her characters’ experience that bring us close up with what makes us human. These lyrical moments are filled with carefully chosen details and clear-eyed empathy.
For example, in “Snippets,” a widow with dementia sits on their bed, clipping from “photos, articles, fabrics,/and pages from instruction manuals” that spark her memory of her husband (while showing us who he was) because “she has to keep him/there on their bed in front/of her.”
Other lyric poems and dramatic monologues also give a native’s view of the back roads, architecture and bookstores of North Carolina. Beneath all of Campbell’s poems is a controlled musical language. This is a remarkable, sure-footed first collection.
–Dr. Marcia Hurlow
