Two of Everything: Poems

Sally Keith

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An abundant and anticipatory collection of poems exploring the season of waiting that precedes adoption.

From Guggenheim fellow and celebrated author Sally Keith comes an incantatory collection of poems on the transformative process of nurturing new life and the practical challenges of starting a family.

In Two of Everything, Keith depicts an evocative domestic landscape. An oriole weaves a nest of "straw, wool, horsehair, and feather" while hopeful parents meet with social workers, compile family videos, write, sketch. Intertwined with these scenes is a candid navigation of the US adoption industry and the unique obstacles faced by queer couples. "I want Amor to promise me that everything will be alright," says the speaker-poet. "But she won't." Interviews don't go as expected, mothers withdraw from adoption conversations, "the bees are dying again." Torn by feelings of shame for participating in a system that commodifies children, Keith's speaker-poet finds herself caught between longing and dismay, wondering if and how poetry can carry us through such moments-and through the mysteries of existence.

But despite their difficult subject matter, these resilient poems sing with love. Singularly thoughtful and characterized by Keith's lush lyricism, this collection demonstrates the tenacity and tenderness needed to build "harbor, shelter, home, house" against all odds.

Book Details

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publish Date: Aug 6th, 2024
Pages: 110
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.50in - 0.26in - 0.33lb
EAN: 9781639550944
Categories: • American - General• Subjects & Themes - Family• Women Authors

About the Author

Keith, Sally: - Sally Keith is the author of Two of Everything, as well as four previous collections of poetry, including River House and The Fact of the Matter. Recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2016, she is a member of the MFA faculty at George Mason University and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Praise for this book

Praise for River House

"No poet of her generation braids passion with intellect more impressively than Sally Keith. And in River House, Keith carries her talent to a whole new level. An elegy for the poet's mother, River House is also an investigation of how we give our lives meaning and shape. At turns gorgeous, wry, and heartbreaking, these poems render the individual soul with a disarming immediacy. To read River House is to feel grief and bewilderment verging into sheer wonder."--Peter Campion, author of Other People

"Heartbreaking and robust. [. . .] Sally Keith's poems possess a quiet music, and their intricate scatters of thought bear witness to the intimate struggles of mourning."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"River because we are moving inexorably forward; house because we are locked forever to the past. Preternaturally calm even as they twist and turn against themselves, the sixty-three poems of River House feel as if they're happening in the time it takes to read them, except that when you're finished with River House, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again. I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss."--James Longenbach, author of forever

"Extraordinary [. . .] The poems focus the reader with a hunger so intelligent, so real, and so immediate, you forget you're reading a poem. It's like looking at the moon while watching the stars disappear: don't you look harder? These poems are clear and strange. They illuminate without consolation. The world has ended many times in our contemporary literary landscape, but rarely has it started over with such agility, economy, and elegance."--Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke

"Honest [. . .] Striking [. . .] I'm mourning with the speaker, each poem somehow more shattering than the one previous."--Coal Hill Review

Praise for The Fact of the Matter

"Through contemporary voices and timeless contexts, these haunting poems fracture--then rebuild--lyric expectations. At times drawing from science and art, epic and elegy, The Fact of the Matter transcends, finally, description's easy borders. Its achievement is singular and stunning--and places Sally Keith at the forefront of younger American poets."--Linda Bierds, author of The Hardy Tree

"In these poems 'stuck on the intricate work, ' Sally Keith proves herself not only among this generation's most vital poets, she reveals herself as a profound thinker of art's complicated relation to the people and events that fill it. The Fact of the Matter speaks lovingly of love's complications--love as a force that depends on fault--and gives to its readers one of the few actual blessings I know: poems unsparing in their care."--Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Song and Silence

"Part-epic, part-elegy, Sally Keith's collection presents 'one world spun into another' a wonderfully involuted tableau where ancient Greek myth, German painting, strip malls, and natural history swirl together with the speaker's mourning."--Kenyon Review

"The elegance of Sally Keith's craft and grounding, pastoral moments contain what might otherwise be rhapsodic verse. What is unsaid is often as loud or louder than what is not withheld."--The Rumpus

"At their best, these acrobatic movements from one fact or phrase to a disparate other are not whimsical non sequiturs but revelations bridging history and the inner life. For Sally Keith, discoveries in any discipline--from physics to painting--push humanity forward, and myth is used not as a crutch for meaning, but as an anchor for new discourse on selfhood in our moment."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)