Rare Earth by Kelsi Vanada

Kelsi Vanada’s poems shine like small, powerful talismans discovered in the weedy tangle of back-yard ground. From the bits and snags of memory, of a family’s immigration lore, of collected material evidence—photographs, property deeds, 8mm home movies—these poems build their enigmatic structures: a lean-to, a boundary line, a “done defected thing.” Wild, complicating syntax, fibers of vision and of hope fret through them.

–Emily Wilson, author of The Great Medieval Yellows

In Kelsi Vanada’s Rare Earth she is “drawn into a scene,” that of her past, from her grandparents’ ranch in South Dakota to Denmark, “the old country.” Images and information “swell in [her] head,” “come into [her] mind,” and in order to make sense of who she is and where she comes from, she must “make a tongue turn thunder.” Poetry then, is necessary to “mend again” by finding the names that make up her lineage and, in turn, find her own name. Through Rare Earth we accompany Vanada in this wonderful search as she observes photographs and engages with family stories. The “work is meticulous” and Vanada is aware that “[i]t’s a brittle prairie” and “there’s / a bit of loss in” writing this poetry.

 –Laura Cesarco Eglin, author of Reborn in Ink

In Kelsi Vanada’s incantatory poems, we encounter a new pastoral—one that corrals danger and decay together with beauty. We meet a speaker taking stock of a ranching life, lost except in memory. We witness a haunting of the land, of a family’s history, and we find her reckoning with the things left behind: “afar is tough / to hold, see rightly.” Set in South Dakota, these arresting poems blaze like a prairie fire and like the exquisite life that loss regenerates. 

–Kathleen Maris Paltrineri, poet and translator