Otherwise, Soft White Ash

Officially Releases October 22nd!

By Kelli Allen

 

ABOUT
In this rerelease of Kelli Allen’s first collection of poetry and short fiction, with a new foreword by Brian Turner, readers are asked to consider how grief and longing continuously occupy the same hut. Allen’s work explores how loss, myth, sexual desire, and the wild journey inward come to shape capital S-Story.

PRAISE FOR OTHERWISE, SOFT WHITE ASH

“To locate the motherlode exacts a cost; to extract and refine it requires
immense dedication and effort. Kelli Allen’s work, which illustrates all
three stages in the making of an artist, burrows deep into Yeats’ ragand-
bone shop. If I were to damn this book with faint praise it would
still burn luminous.”
— Gary Geddes, poet and editor of 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics

“Kelli Allen’s debut collection Otherwise, Soft White Ash is remarkably
clear sighted; with a fearless approach she shows us “hope is a round
shade of some beloved eye, watching as we climb, climb hard…” but
here, the words seem to stalk meaning (or meaning is climbing after
the words) the language becomes haunted, almost sinister, and poetry
swallows the truth like “the priest ignores the ark in his woods because
he is busy absorbing his shadow.” To overcome this shadow she
goes there, she unflinchingly delves into the darkest parts of sorrow
“and the animals know their work is to hide every egg like dark stones
meant for the river.” Kelli’s poetry reveals these “dark stones,” these elemental
life and death struggles of survival, and through her rich and
effulgent writing she brings us through it and back to those moments
of truth where “silence is its own type of vertigo,” and “gratefulness
is rhetoric aimed closer at thunder than rain,” the reader walks away
from this collection feeling humbled, grateful and yes, even blessed.”
— Melanie Huber, Book Review Editor, New York Quarterly

“There is incantation in Kelli Allen’s Otherwise, Soft White Ash, a kind
of magic which good poetry has always striven towards. Kelli does not
shirk; she does not look away from her poetic responsibilities. She
leads us into the middle of a miraculous forest, and, if we willingly
leap with her, we learn the hidden names of all the trees. These poems
are full of the dark and wonderful complexities of life.”
— Glenn Irwin, Assistant Director, UMSL MFA

“The poetry and poetic prose in Otherwise, Soft White Ash reconditions
us to our world’s wonders with imaginative words we
want to carry around, because in the lightness of their absence, it’s
shown that there is truly a shame above all others: missing out on
Kelli Allen’s exceptionally intellectual and highly physical writing.”
— Tyler Malone, author of The Brief Life Is Always the Best

“Kelli Allen’s work cuts a measured path through the thickets of life,
love and the natural world, offering the reader a new perspective on
our oldest concerns. Exploring a range of challenging themes—doubt,
jealousy, violence, on a grander scale, the tension between cultures—
Allen nonetheless generates a warmth that protects us ‘against certain
/ coming snow.'”
— James Roderick Burns, Other Poetry

“A compendium of prose and poetic narratives, Kelli Allen’s Otherwise,
Soft White Ash marks the emergence of a poet possessed of a fierce and
contrarian voice and intelligence. Throughout, while delving deeply
into themes both playful and painful, Allen fights a hard and successful
battle against sentiment. Constantly, she pushes the boulder uphill
with the result that her reader is privileged to experience the world in a
new way and see the fractured spaces we live in as being more complex
than we had imagined. Otherwise, Soft White Ash is a most impressive
first collection.”
— Eamonn Wall, author of Sailing Lake Mareotis

“One of Kelli Allen’s strengths is rendering impressions. “Orphaned
Near the Cave” speaks explicitly of “old masters,” but this idea of
something ancient, something tribal, is also implicit through the
story’s imagery. The world Allen draws is at once character specific
yet universal, modern yet mythic. In it, readers catch glimpses of
their own lives, their own worlds, but what sticks is the feeling of
something deeper, something more collective. To accomplish this
to the degree she does, Allen relies on shadows, suggestions, the
connotative—almost as if she herself has mastered the art of seeing
her own world impressionistically, with one eye squinted, the other
mostly so.”
— Don Balch, Editor, Echo Ink Review

Kelli Allen’s wise and lovely and poetic stories tap into hidden and
unknown emotions. They are the kinds of stories that should be read
out loud, and more than once.
— Mary Troy, author of Beauties