"[The Renunciations] is a lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside of old mythologies and traumas in search of new stories fashioned from love and joy. . . . Like some sort of oracle, Kelly offers us the words to create our own destinies."--Oprah.com

"These poems map the overlapping geographies of trauma and desire, combining Ovidian imagery with an emphasis on omission, redaction, and revision."--The New Yorker

"These walloping lyrics land like a punch to the gut, but just as powerful is what Kelly elides and omits. . . . A harrowing work of courageous lyricism."--Booklist

"[The Renunciations] is impeccably structured. . . . Kelly's second effort feels scraped raw, seeking to understand humanity in primal terms in the same way as her debut, but here building to even grander emotional and linguistic crescendo."--Library Journal, starred review

"Kelly (Bestiary) explores in her powerful latest the tenuous line between desire and trauma in poems that ache with memory and revelation. . . . While many of the poems delve into difficult personal and familial ground, they also move toward a kind of catharsis where the truth is 'every body makes its own ash, / manages its own diminishing.' This devastating collection makes a startling and memorable elegy of those ashes."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[The Renunciations] is a powerful ode to resilience and drawing boundaries of the self while recovering from trauma."--Book Riot

"With an expansive voice that is always tethered to the craft of material of stanzas and lines, Kelly creates a powerful second book [in The Renunciations]."--The Millions

"The journey we take in The Renunciations is nothing short of rescue mission. And who else but Donika Kelly could offer such a lucid guide to the central figure of this book, as she navigates her most difficult years. . . . The poems are startling, disturbing, and relentlessly bold. I can't imagine a time before having The Renunciations as a part of my emotional ecosystem and poetic landscape. Thank you, Donika, is what I really want to say."--francine j. harris

"With Donika Kelly's signature stinging beauty, The Renunciations names acts of wounding and making, refuses to separate elemental memory from the language of human remembrance. . . . Kelly's poems gather us from cliff edge to river fold, from terror to more terror, from what cannot be known to what intuition and mirrors can divine."--Khadijah Queen

"In The Renunciations, her vital new poetry collection, Donika Kelly harnesses 'the air, the earth, and flame' to renounce the old gods: child abuse, violence, racial injustice, generational trauma. . . . The Renunciations is a work of stunning power, alive with haunting images, complex metaphor. And while Kelly looks unsparingly at pain and suffering--her own and others'--with transformation comes joy."--Ellen Bass

"In stunning poems such as these it requires not only excavation but thinking about how to present what is excavated, artfully. Kelly does that incredibly well. . . . [The Renunciations] is, overall, intelligent and deeply affecting."--Roxane Gay