Spill: Poems

Kelle Groom’s newest book of poems tells it slant, as we are tipped into her world with a hand that seems both inconsolable and utterly aware. These are poems charged with her singular imagery, (stitched down by her expansive, ravishing lines), and this work of being both inside and outside a body, a room, a door, a house, is how we leap with her, as if we’re always on the verge of some fairy tale, familiar but without end, all while her heart is populated with a certainty about uncertainty, and as she tries to find what she has lost but holds ever so near. —Sophie Cabot Black

When I finished reading this urgent, restorative book, I wanted to turn to Kelle Groom—because it felt as if she were really there—and say, "thank you for the honor of letting me stand inside this so-large heart while the world went on spinning in its unforgiving, totally forgivable way." No joke. Some rare books you actually get to rest inside of, protected by the writer’s trust and wisdom. This is one. —David Rivard

In Kelle Groom's Spill I finally understand why love is always the third phrase we learn in a new language after we learn goodbye. Here, home is a coast, birds appear like visitations, and the heart is a door the ocean stutters through. These poems break me open but then let language heal around the wound. For Groom, nothing--not even love--is unspeakable. —Traci Brimhall

Kelle Groom's latest collection, Spill, maps an ever-shifting terrain of absence and profound loss with lyric intimacy, generosity, and necessity. These poems are imaginatively and aesthetically restless, exploring an interior landscape of memory while also recognizing that we live in a world of souls layered in trouble and delight. Groom's poems often counter-balance pain with a nuanced sense of humor, a humor born of great attention, and this, in turn, rises from a deep well of empathy. Early on, Spill promises—"If someone must saw open/ my chest I want all this light to be what spills out." Kelle Groom promises a gift of light, and the poems in Spill make good on this promise. —Brian Turner