Banjo’s Inside Coyote

• Banjo’s Inside Coyote
• Price: $16.00
• Poetry | PB
• Pages-72
• ISBN 978-1-936196-95-1
• March 2019
• Kelli Allen

The old gods only ask for forgiveness when watching from too far a distance. They guess and risk and let their furred ankles meet a finger’s shaky tip. In our looking up and inward, we, too, construct a primeval forest populated by winding rows of tiger lilies imagined in a lover’s nautical ear where shipwrecks line beaches made of nickel and iron. Here, hunger comprises both soil and canopy, and little escapes the hourglass’s rough rim. The poems in this collection are meant for such appetites. Images do not just leap from line to line, they duck and burrow between pages, careful to reveal their earnestness only to those with mouths open wide. Banjo’s Inside Coyote is a book of questions—those meant to remind us to stay longer in the mossy Inn and listen close to stories we should not soon forget. In every port, one barstool will host a long wagging tail. If we follow its swing to spine to throat to snout, we will notice teeth spread broad in a smile, in a welcome and warning. Answers are risky. They are propelled by lust and hope for beauty, by something like a winged raft too quick down a trickster’s river. The poems in Kelli Allen’s third full length collection ask us to curl our tongues past the lips we lick for salt, the ones we part when asking for longer here, in this place of pirate flags and slick bellies still hot under busy palms. These are poems for what we offer inside-out, for whomever might be waiting on the shore.

HYPE

“Kelli Allen’s images are like ancient things long tied inside a sack, waiting for the magician-poet to charm loose the string. Free, they reclaim their wildness, their passion, and in appreciation, they knit themselves into brand new songs, surreal and sensual. Read these poems twice, three times, and for God’s sake out loud—eventually they begin to wedge open a sort of third eye in the unconscious. Afterward it is difficult to think of anything—animals, bodies of water, seashells, blizzards, fingers—as ordinary.”

—Justin Hamm, author of American Ephemeral and Lessons in Ruin.

“I sat up all night with these remarkable creations and this morning my world is full of magical new things. Kelli Allen is a witch queen of the sharp, insightful word. Her poems possess a piercing wit and a playfulness that meshes intimately with tenderness, sadness and sometimes a faint echo of regret.

There is an ancient soul singing quietly through these lines, one often amused by the vagaries and contradictions of this life but never less than fully engaged with her subject and her subject is life, how it is lived, how it is sometimes endured, how it is celebrated. The lines pour like expensive oils or rich, sweetened cream, like an eldritch spell and I am ensorcelled.

Be greedy with this book, keep it close to you at all times, treat it like a rare, fragile thing, find the quiet places in this rushing world where you can for a brief moment, open the pages and inhale beauty.”

-Mick Corrigan, author of Deep Fried Unicorn and Life Coaching for Gargoyles

“I dived unprepared in the poetic ocean of Kelli Allen’s new book Banjo’s Inside Coyote. Soon enough I realized that her words can drag you in too deep but at the same time they are saturated with lots of oxygen. Kelli Allen is a poet who can make you feel real hunger for her lines while you read them, she can tell you that “Bitterness is the marrow left too long on the bone…” and “No bull knows the thickness of its own rough horn” and the poems will stay with you long after you have read them. These beautiful poems are full of joy, sadness, regret, bittersweet memories, love and a lot of lust. Kelli Allen is a magnificent flame. And if you want to get burned, try the fire of these poems.”

-Peycho Kanev, author of Bone Silence, and Raw Meat

“Kelli Allen writes poetry the way scholars study ancient manuscripts, noting not only overt meanings but also the look of the script, the iconography of the marginalia, and of course, the often-darker subtext. Her poems are vivid with flourish, yet intensely cerebral. In Banjo’s Inside Coyote, again and again she finds the sweet spot between complexity and accessibility, much like Jennifer L. Knox at the top of her game. ‘We can only teach each other a simple dance,’ she writes, and we as readers feel the rhythm building. Allen touches often on the natural world—she has a special affinity for birds. At the same time, she never strays far from human nature, showing its beautiful and awful sides. ‘A tongue- / tip remembers salt in all five directions,’ she writes, expressing passion in one poem, while in another she copes with hurt, describing its feeling: ‘every window in this house rolls down as shades / suddenly liquid glass and each snort and breath / is a relief.’ It’s that interplay between light and dark, sacred and profane, kindness and spite, that makes Banjo’s Inside Coyote such a compelling book—one that demands a second reading right away.”

—Ace Boggess, author of The Prisoners and I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So