{"id":493,"date":"2014-10-25T12:37:14","date_gmt":"2014-10-25T12:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/?p=493"},"modified":"2017-03-30T21:15:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T21:15:03","slug":"tributary-kevin-mclellan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/book\/tributary-kevin-mclellan\/","title":{"rendered":"TRIBUTARY<\/EM>, KEVIN McLELLAN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The poems of Kevin McLellan\u2019s highly accomplished first collection are haunting and elliptical but never oblique or encoded. Lightning flashes of insight, memory, elegy, and stern self-reckonings illuminate the horizons of these poems, which are unsettling and ecstatic by turns. These are the poems of ‘polysemy without mask’ that Paul Celan strove to write, and Kevin McLellan is a poet of singular promise.
\n\u2014David Wojahn<\/p>\n


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Writing with a matrix of loss, Tributary<\/em> begins where language is most labile and finds manifest reasons for praise. Here is a blueprint of what I can only call the partiality<\/em> of human experience, where time and perception offer moments, never totalities, of individual purpose for existing. If it is true ‘that a you doesn\u2019t \/ exist, and one hundred \/ and two times over \/ faith is lost’ (“Hands: A Tribute”), it is equally true that these poems pay homage to the nature of that secondary state, where faith is as often found. Locating the tribute inside of Tributary<\/em>, this book is an impressive debut, and Kevin McLellan might well be a Heraclitus for the twenty-first century.
\n\u2014Claudia Keelan<\/p>\n

“the mind, my mind \/ is cut flowers: I lost \/ my body between \/ field and vases…” Tweet<\/a>
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