Spill

In these extraordinary new poems, Kelle Groom rejects consolation in favor of an expanding definition of love. Groom, who has published in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, confronts the face of mortality and political/cultural crisis in Spill. Her answer is love in every direction: from a homeless shelter in Orlando to a halfway house run by the holy girls of Blackpool, Ireland, to Croatian students dressing her in white, “a wedding dress.” Her luminous language is both witness and incantation, in poems that range from Steve McQueen & her young father, to 2,000 snow geese falling from the sky, a sleep disorder clinic, and just-hatched turtles. As Nick Flynn noted, “This book is an offering, an attempt to capture the quicksilver nature of consciousness, of what it's like to move through our world of burdens & joys.” Spill is a call to live, to fill with light.