Sky. Pond. Mouth. Book Launch
May 8
Excerpts from the review by Ruben Quesada for the Harvard Review:
The poetic landscape of Sky. Pond. Mouth. is at once spectral and pulsing with life. This is a later career collection for Kevin McLellan (ACT Senior Financial Assistant), whose previous works include books of poetry as well as book objects. He joins the experimental queer poets before him—Gertrude Stein, CA Conrad, Eileen Myles, Frank O’Hara—in transmuting the quotidian into the numinous, and consecrating the everyday as loci of contemplation, desire, and grief
These poems blur the boundaries between the animate and inanimate and the personal and universal. When awarding the collection the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize, the judge observed that each “noun is potentially non-I and I. The isolated being is the connected being and vice-versa.” This ontological fluidity and linguistic play echo Stein, even as McLellan forges a new lyric terrain….
For all its stark probity, Sky. Pond. Mouth. brims with whimsy and irreverence. Like his queer poet forebearers, McLellan deploys radical linguistic experimentation in service of liberatory politics and poetics. Meanwhile his voice remains incandescent and visceral, and as readers we emerge transfigured, attuned to the ethereal pulsation within our bodies. Poetry becomes a site of reckoning, revelation, and rapture.
The full review can be found here.
