Kelli Allen

Imagine Not Drowning Kelli Allen

Poetry. Women's Studies. IMAGINE NOT DROWNING considers what it means to toss back our heads and allow the water inward. These poems go far beyond traditional myth structures and into spaces courting ugly sex and wild wings unfurling. There are beaks snaking between thighs and sweaters whirling down slow to rest in our dirt and sand. Poetry continually asks us to define home and our place in a world too often oblivious to our desires. The poems in this collection offer questions whose answers are suggested peripherally, on how to differentiate between our needs and our vicious, predatory wants. Beauty means falling from the bridge ledge on purpose. This book is sometimes a breakwater, other times it's the air we meet between the leap and hard contact of the first wet, concentric rings. Recognition means being brave enough to put one line after another, to say these images are us, they are the sounds we make when our lungs are close to full.