In “Prayer for My Father’s Hands,” a standout poem from Devin Kelly’s second full-length collection, In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen, he writes “I want / to walk the long road of family as another means / of prayer, to believe in prayer as another word for crying. // Maybe to love another enough to touch them / is to risk cruelty or healing all the same.” Kelly’s collection is that long road, full of family, love, […]
Permutations, Mutations, and New Ballads: Thoughts on Three Literary Remixes
Ubiquity is a hell of a thing. No two people will have the same narratives, pop culture references, or cultural mythologies dwelling in the back of their heads–but there are certain stories that are familiar enough to enough people that they’re ripe for retelling. Or, in some cases, they’re ripe for modification, for translation into another narrative, playing with readers’ expectations and knowledge of the source material. To cite a few examples, John Darnielle’s short novel Master of Reality used […]
What Could’ve Happened: On Thought in Fiction
What Could’ve Happened: On Thought in Fiction by Devin Kelly Just over a half year ago, I went to Ireland to spend an almost week with the girl I was seeing. I arrived early in Dublin, bleary eyed and still forever waking, always unable to sleep on planes. We went straight to Galway on what I presumed to be a typically Irish day – grey, water appearing as a thin spiraling drop through the sky. Our hair blew everywhere wherever […]
Sunday Stories: “Tender Waters”
Tender Waters by Devin Kelly All summer long we went skipping stones, my sister and I. And we held hands, down through the trees that we called the gatekeepers of the river. And we kept our bodies close and those two hands hidden as if they were watching. When winter came, it was cotton on cotton, no more skin on skin, the trees covered in snow, blind and white like the skin of a child, our arms swinging out in […]