Threads

by Robert Kelly

Poetry. Rusty Morrison says of THREADS: "The complex architectures of Robert Kelly's poem-length sentences keep the reader awake to the materiality of any meaning-making, and to the ardor we can feel for artifice. While grammatically accurate, Kelly's sentences aggravate conventions of completion and subject unity; even though "words break into the clearing" of comprehension, still, to read them means journeying on "a dark road cherishing its mystery / the mystery that talks / qui interroge whatever / asks itself also / at the same time asks you..." And though these sentences travel long and far, Kelly has set the metronome of enjambment to a breath-catching rhythm, so that we indeed feel each "sentence swinging forward in the dark / to meet what, to meet / the meaning of encounter."

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.