WE ARE CHANGED TO DEER AT THE BROKEN PLACE

by Kelly Weber

This collection considers what it means to be a queer nonbinary daughter in search of mother and myth as refuges. Inhabiting and breaking inherited forms like the sonnet, the speaker rewrites mythology to find new possibilities of queer transformation within inherited traditions—in which bodies not only change to trees and deer to escape the cishet male gaze, but also break the gaze itself. Intimate lyrics chart the interior landscape of the speaker’s asexuality and aromanticism and explore the queered nuances of body and of platonic friendships. In the process, the book explores the mother wound of how these myths are inherited and what it means to create a new story, a new vocabulary, a new kind of breaking.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2022

About the author

Kelly Weber (she/they) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, forthcoming December 2022) and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (forthcoming October 2023). She is the reviews editor for Seneca Review. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a Best American Poetry Author Spotlight, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, Salamander, The Journal, Passages North, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives with two rescue cats. More of their work can be found at kellymweber.com.

Reviews

[Megan Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this collection, the body is a landscape; objects grow out of, break out of, and are buried within it. Weber grapples with questions of sexuality, mother- and daughterhood, and gender through allusions to Greek mythology (esp. Artemis) and stunning imagery and metaphor centered on the natural world. This is an unapologetically queer and asexual (and aromantic) work of art. Those who enjoyed the Orpheus and Eurydice allusions in Portrait of a Lady on Fire will love this book. I certainly did.

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I tried to be girl again each time, soften husk, but I had to snap a root, bleed a little more, peel bark from phalanges, leave a tongue in silent and spittle.

take the bow that would've hunted, try to make a sternum of it. tensile enough not to break. the story repeats: all of us tree girls learned to be of : of rib, of run, of gaze, of gone, of pursuit, of shatter"

Each time I've tried to put a review into words for Weber's debut collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Brokek Places, I can't quite get the words to work the way I need them to. Maybe that's because Kelly uses words and images we are familiar with, sometimes lovingly, sometimes in a strange sense of terror, and deconstruct the world around them (gender, mother/daughter, ill & healthy, wild/unwild, societal structure verses animal instinct, desires), and by way of mirrors, as nature so often is, deconstructs the world around us. You become animal while reading this collection & it's nearly impossible to return to what you otherwise were before it. The beauty of that is, would you want to?

[nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I make a myth of / you to teach us all how to be something better…”

“…Each / of us have carried you for a time, thought of you as our own, this god / we have made inside all our bellies with each retelling: who was made / to hunt, who to be hunted…” (“Actaeon,” 68)

an absolutely stunning collection; an unbelievable debut book. I was drawn to this lush, complex interior landscape informed by a proud queer/aroace/asexual voice and the act of “daughtering,” charted with a through-line of Ovidian transformation, with the mythic and the modern overlaid. (read! this! book!)

[Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging poetry exploring sexuality.