Amytis Leaves Her Garden

Amytis Leaves Her Garden is a lovely, lyrical collection. I particularly admire the musicality of your indvidual lines. You write with an admirable density.
~ comments from Dana Gioia

Karen Kelsay's distinct poetic voice descends not from the modernists, but from the 19th-century "poetess" tradition that is being rediscovered by feminist scholars. Kelsay is the editor of Victorian Violet Press poetry journal, and like flowers pressed within the pages of a Victorian album, her poems translate memorable experiences into compressed visual images, and vice versa. Lush passages of description and hard-earned lines of wisdom lodge in the reader's mind.

~ Julie Kane, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2012

Studying this collection, "Amytis Leaves Her Garden," I am captivated most by author Karen Kelsay's confidence in her audience. Hers is a verse to respect the reader at every turn - beauty without blind, trap, or land-mine, as secure in itself as it is in its reader. "I read my thoughts on some far distant night..." she writes in the poem 'Quiet Flame' - an apt epithet for the collection - "...green willow trees with soft Parisian light." And, seated in her audience, I feel as though not only is that light my own possession, but -"far and distant" - the thought, as well.

~ Jennifer Reeser