I read poetry because I want to be transported into another world; I want to be told a story; I want to escape; I want to be blown away; or I want to float in the continuous suspension of language. These caveats are all present along with four elements that arrest you when you pick up Kelli Allen’s book Otherwise, Soft White Ash. The cover art makes you look closer.  A large rabbit rides a patchwork wolf through a field of trash. The entire cover is monochromatic except for the trash, which is rendered in color.  Upon closer inspection a local reader will realize that the trash is also local—Imo’s pizza carton, Budweiser case, and something hidden in the grass I will not reveal. Upon opening the book, you realize there is more here than a compilation of previously published works or a specially ordered Table of Contents. The first thing you think of is that this book has been designed.  This author or publisher and artist took it upon themselves to actually offer a book design that supports the written work.  Otherwise is illustrated!

Danielle Spradley’s folkloric art, Saddled, is found on the cover and throughout the book. There is a blend of prose and poetry that adds a breathing quality to this book allowing us to take in sumptuous gasps of air between parts.  The cover art, illustration, and design elements, and uncommon mix of story and poetry work together to hold our attentions.

It is a curious process to search for thesis maps in the design and placement of parts in a book, but deciphering the language logic alone, could not lead us safely down the paths toward the alternate worlds alluded to in Kelli Allen’s writing. This book of prose, verse, and illustration offers such strong visual and heartfelt elements that the map we need to guide us along the road is readily available with clues throughout. These clues explain the crux of why we should consider re-imagining our worlds from childhood and beyond.

In “Orphaned Near the Cave,” there’s an egg, a litany of shame, green earrings, a grandfather telling Baba Yaga tales and building a special wall.  There’s a little girl, Celia, fathoming her own place in a world where fairy tales mix with reality and a there’s a disapproving dancing mother carrying cranberries in a “squat sequined bag.” Celia holds her mother’s head in her lap as she attempts to bleed to death and recover from yet “another rehearsal for ending her life.” And there’s more: elephants and dragonflies and Ivan, a lost heirloom watch, and fishing photos—“This boy, an urchin operating purely from his own conception of joy, would grab the grey bucket, take a fish lung, place it on the ground, and leap onto it quickly, a stomp creating a loud pop which I could feel in my throat as I watched from a table near the shore, using the camera to see closer, to still and finalize each moment.” (11) Celia grows up and comes to terms with her own story:             

I know where the cave’s mouth gapes, and how the secret dens tucked high and black against rock must invent their stories . . . I have learned little from my mother. If there is no test for truth, what else can we do but walk . . .and wait to feed whatever wild animals wait for us near the wood’s edge? (11-12)

There are four sections in Kelli’s book. An Introduction by Kerry Cohen and Kelli’s coming-of-age story, “Orphaned at the Cave,” lead us into the rich language world in the poetry sections “One: Otherwise Soft White Ash” and  “II: Making the Mouth” where we continue our journey toward “III: Notes to Elijah” and the end, another prose section, “Four: One Final Wing.” The end where we stand with the grandfather’s warning from the opening story “that where we choose to let the story end is dependent upon faith and, sometimes, intention.”

In “Otherwise, Soft White Ash, ” the lead poem in the first part, the mother and her bag appear again, this time “like an overripe avocado.”(18) In “Noon, Like Whiplash,” “There is no room for apology/at any moment in the scene, neither/when it unfurled as quick thin tentacles/or now, when recollection feels viscous/ and tastes of paint left to dry on a lid.”(21) Later in the same poem, “The sheets on her bed were beautiful,/and watching her blood deploy itself/over the quiet sheen of the cotton/was a betrayal of sorts. I imagined/she would wake at any moment; her mouth/opening in an impossible “O,” and hordes/of butterflies would emerge and become her hair.” (23)

The last poem in this section is divided into six roman numbered parts and two offer meta-poetry about verse.  In fact, in parts II and III of  “Amputated Landscape, Closer to Getting There,” Allen writes: “Verse contains everything./ A line can hold or ignore/any number of ideas, images,/ expressions, admonishments,/desires, and rarely,/only if we look closely/enough, eyes ready to dart/back away, truths. I try/ to strap my lines/ into obedience just long enough/ to hold them to the page—” (30) and then in part III: “A verse is a solid place/for a man’s bathrobe/to fall open in the hallway”(31).  In this same poem Allen lures us with language: “That is the universe/ where I am allowed/ to inhabit glass-walled bars/where the waitresses/ are all peeled and wicked,/ the machinery of the insect legs/both repulsive and seductive.” (29)

The mother appears in every poem in Part One; however, we do not see her in “II: Making the Mouth,” until page 61 (although she may be implied earlier) with butterflies in a soybean field in “Every Story Began on a Wing.” In the eighteen poems before this, we can imagine and dream with nature and beasts and there is promise. After this, hope continues and even baseball appears definitively in “Remembering Birds” on page 75. All of the middle poems wander in and out of one of Ms. Allen’s favorite themes, myth.

The final poems, “Part III Notes for Elijah” are dedicated to Kelli Allen’s son, according to Kerry Cohen in the Introduction. They are, in essence, messages left to him for the future from the author who is now a mother. Otherwise ends like it begins with a prose piece, “Words for Open,” and here myth and emotion combine to offer our transport.       

There was no embroidery on the fabric’s surface and when you lifted the lowest arch of my back and slid the pillow’s roundness beneath me, it was cool and silken, so much that I lost any awareness of its shape apart from my own. (105)

It is difficult to advise whether one should read this before bed as I did for several nights over and over, because the contents can send you into a dreamland from which it may be difficult to re-emerge.  If it were not for the accompaniment of the wolf and hare and egg drawings, I think I would not have had the courage to finish, and it would have been my loss. Kelli Allen’s Otherwise, Soft White Ash transports and transforms us with wings we have not considered.

-MM Anderson
January 9, 2013



Run For the Hills

They did not tell me I would boil from the inside out.
They did not tell me that I would become unbearably bored
or that I’d never make any money,
and that it would become difficult to move.

They did not tell me medication would be required,
I would crave the under side of the underdog,
or that love would be difficult.
They did not tell me my eyesight would give out.

They did not tell me that I wouldn’t be able to sleep
or that Earth would die, slowly, while I watched.
They did not tell me about the alcohol or the drugs
or that corn could kill ya.

They did not tell me I would wait constantly for the phone to ring,
and then that it would ring incessantly.
I was told I’d be alone in the end, but I did not listen.

MM Anderson
St. Louis, MO
2013

MM Anderson:
Grew up in Hawaii and North Dakota.
Went to school in Indiana and Texas.
Got married.
Teaching Native American Studies, Poetry, and Fiction.
Likes to cook.