Two of Everything: Poems

(Paperback)

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An abundant and anticipatory collection of poems exploring the season of waiting that precedes adoption.

From Guggenheim fellow and celebrated author Sally Keith comes an incantatory collection of poems on the transformative process of nurturing new life and the practical challenges of starting a family.

In Two of Everything, Keith depicts an evocative domestic landscape. An oriole weaves a nest of straw, wool, horsehair, and feather while hopeful parents meet with social workers, compile family videos, write, sketch. Intertwined with these scenes is a candid navigation of the US adoption industry and the unique obstacles faced by queer couples. I want Amor to promise me that everything will be alright, says the speaker-poet. But she wont. Interviews dont go as expected, mothers withdraw from adoption conversations, the bees are dying again. Torn by feelings of shame for participating in a system that commodifies children, Keiths speaker-poet finds herself caught between longing and dismay, wondering if and how poetry can carry us through such momentsand through the mysteries of existence.

But despite their difficult subject matter, these resilient poems sing with love. Singularly thoughtful and characterized by Keiths lush lyricism, this collection demonstrates the tenacity and tenderness needed to build harbor, shelter, home, house against all odds.

Reviews

Praise for River House

No poet of her generation braids passion with intellect more impressively than Sally Keith. And in River House, Keith carries her talent to a whole new level. An elegy for the poets mother, River House is also an investigation of how we give our lives meaning and shape. At turns gorgeous, wry, and heartbreaking, these poems render the individual soul with a disarming immediacy. To read River House is to feel grief and bewilderment verging into sheer wonder.Peter Campion, author of Other People

Heartbreaking and robust. [. . .] Sally Keiths poems possess a quiet music, and their intricate scatters of thought bear witness to the intimate struggles of mourning.Publishers Weekly (starred review)

River because we are moving inexorably forward; house because we are locked forever to the past.Preternaturally calm even as they twist and turn against themselves, the sixty-three poems of River House feel as if theyre happening in the time it takes to read them, except that when youre finished with River House, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again.I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss.James Longenbach, author of forever

Extraordinary[. . .] The poems focus the reader with a hunger so intelligent, so real, and so immediate, you forget youre reading a poem. Its like looking at the moon while watching the stars disappear: dont you look harder These poems are clear and strange. They illuminate without consolation.The world has ended many times in our contemporary literary landscape, but rarely has it started over with such agility, economy, and elegance.Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke

Honest[. . .] Striking[. . .] Im mourning with the speaker, each poem somehow more shattering than the one previous.Coal Hill Review

Praise for The Fact of the Matter

Through contemporary voices and timeless contexts, these haunting poems fracturethen rebuildlyric expectations. At times drawing from science and art, epic and elegy, The Fact of the Matter transcends, finally, descriptions easy borders. Its achievement is singular and stunningand places Sally Keith at the forefront of younger American poets.Linda Bierds, author of The Hardy Tree

In these poems stuck on the intricate work, Sally Keith proves herself not only among this generations most vital poets, she reveals herself as a profound thinker of arts complicated relation to the people and events that fill it. The Fact of the Matter speaks lovingly of loves complicationslove as a force that depends on faultand gives to its readers one of the few actual blessings I know: poems unsparing in their care.Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Song and Silence

Part-epic, part-elegy, Sally Keiths collection presents one world spun into another: a wonderfully involuted tableau where ancient Greek myth, German painting, strip malls, and natural history swirl together with the speakers mourning.Kenyon Review

The elegance of Sally Keiths craft and grounding, pastoral moments contain what might otherwise be rhapsodic verse. What is unsaid is often as loud or louder than what is not withheld.The Rumpus

At their best, these acrobatic movements from one fact or phrase to a disparate other are not whimsical non sequiturs but revelations bridging history and the inner life. For Sally Keith, discoveries in any disciplinefrom physics to paintingpush humanity forward, and myth is used not as a crutch for meaning, but as an anchor for new discourse on selfhood in our moment.Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Bio

Sally Keith is the author of Two of Everything, as well as four previous collections of poetry, including River House and The Fact of the Matter. Recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2016, she is a member of the MFA faculty at George Mason University and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.