This Strange Grace

A poem about choosing not to love. One about sorting through old photographs with parents. Another about navigating a difficult and intimate life choice. One about getting hit by a cyclist while crossing the street-"a small, mercurial moment and we are / eye to eye with our marrow, bodies owned / not by us but by the birth of the Universe". In her debut poetry collection This Strange Grace, Kelly Slivka invites us to share in the sharpness of her lived experiences, then employs them as portals through which we may enter into play with the enduring questions of existence. "It is important to remember what you cannot do," she writes in a poem about a magnolia bud she keeps on her desk. "You are surrounded by magics you cannot perform." Where do we belong, she prompts us to ask. Why are we here, and how do we go on? Integrating Slivka's background in ecology, her keen eye for the natural world, and her efforts to develop and understand her communal relationships, the poems in This Strange Grace do not shy away from the eternal terra incognita that is perhaps at the inscrutable heart of all art. Taken together, these poems render for the reader an instinctive and eager exploration of what it is to be alive-on a personal scale, on a global scale, and on the humbling scale of deep time.