Kelli Allen

Leaving The Skin On The Bear Kelli Allen

Part soft underbelly, part scabrous self-reflection, Leaving the Skin on the Bear is a collection that takes readers on a sojourn through

the richly imagined weaving of a world that is both our own and not. The poems collected here celebrate otherness and contradiction, demand understanding and the acceptance of not-knowing simultaneously. These poems stay the crooked path and reimagine what it is, and has always been, to learn that no loss is complete. The untamed imageries summoned here leap from one form to another in

their need to meet the demands of what becomes a steady inquiry. This is not a collection of answers, but a testimony of what a life lived in questions might look like. In these pages we are, perhaps above all else, brought nearer to knowing the vanity of containing, and of what we bury. Living is a cycle of unearthings. This collection's recurring potsherd cuts despair into our certainty, and its cost, towards the world. These pieces suggest that turning away from what wounds is the forgetting that strips a crucial magic: the capacity to marvel at feeling.