A Conjoined Book

 Continuing the lyric investigations of her first two books, Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book hinges together two new volumes—Aftermath and Become Tree, Become Bird—to create a meditation on the construction of meaning. Unfolding after an unnamed ecological and emotional fracture, Aftermath’s phrases and imagery layer a landscape of rift dividing the self from the self. The second book, Become Tree, Become Bird grafts the Brothers Grimm’s The Juniper Tree onto the body of Aftermath, naming fracture’s loss and reworking what has splintered into a variation of the fairy tale. 

Omnidawn, 2014.