"Render" available for pre-order today!

My new, full-length collection of poetry, Render, is available for pre-order for just $11.96 at Sibling Rivalry Press. You can purchase it at this LINK. 


Praise

Collin Kelley’s poems are postcards from the past — from journeys taken and dreamed, from places half-remembered or half-wanted, of people lost but not forgotten. The blurring of the memories conflate America’s collective history — the Civil War, pop culture, heroes — with individual history, where marriages divide and fall and actresses act as saviors and guides. “Expect imperfections and subtle debris,” the final poem suggests. Kelley’s voice is neither imperfect nor broken here—these are poems of salvage, where even the Titanic is raised, where everyone we’ve loved or failed can be restored. Where we find ourselves renewed.

- Charles Jensen, The First Risk

 
Render is an absolutely beautiful telling of a life in poems: brave, direct, and crafted in short narratives that are both satisfying and disturbing in all the best ways — ways in which we need to be disturbed, in which the reader is given the pleasure and honor of an authentic voice. I read Kelley’s book straight through, and was both sorry and sated at the end. I recommend it to everyone in the queer arena and beyond who craves a poetry of depth, insight, and luminous humanity.

- Maureen Seaton, Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (1991-2011)
 

The poems in Collin Kelley’s Render time travel back into childhood, a ‘70s landscape of Wonder Woman, Blondie, and Three Mile Island, to find the nascent beginnings of self: a young man growing into his own consciousness as the more complicated relationship between his parents stretches and strains, threatening to come undone. In these poems, Kelley deftly and poignantly braids together history and the present tense to create the portrait of a child who is already a poet, watchful and perceptive. With crystalline imagery, unexpected tropes, and luminous language, the poems in this collection remind us again and again how we are shaped by where we come from — and how we alone determine where we go from there. A gorgeous, sassy, sexy collection by an exceptionally fine poet.

- Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song