(b/w photograph by Marion Ettlinger)
Kelle Groom's memoir, I WORE THE OCEAN IN THE SHAPE OF A GIRL (Simon & Schuster 2011; paperback 2012), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir of 2011, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah.com O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor's Pick. Her poetry collections are SPILL (Anhinga Press 2017),FIVE KINGDOMS (Anhinga Press 2010), LUCKILY (Anhinga 2006), and UNDERWATER CITY (University Press of Florida 2004). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others, and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Non-Required Reading anthologies. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Library of Congress, James Merrill House Writer-in-Residence, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, American Antiquarian Society, and Ucross Foundation, as well as both a 2010 and a 2006 Florida Book Award, a State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs grant, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. The 2012-13 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Sierra Nevada College, Groom is now on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe. Former poetry editor of The Florida Review, she is now a contributing editor.
Kelle Groom website: www.KelleGroom.com
I WORE THE OCEAN IN THE SHAPE OF A GIRL (FREE PRESS/SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2011)
"If any memoir has a pulse running through it, if any work of art contains within it the potential of transcendence, it is in your hands. 'I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl' begins in a kind of glorious, terrible, ridiculous chaos, but then as we get closer and closer to its heartbreaking center and to the narrator herself, the "heavy things" start falling off - of her, of us - a heaviness we didn't know we'd even been carrying. Kelle Groom has somehow found a container for each bright, hard spark of this life."
-- Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb
"I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl took my breath, and then my heart, away. That Kelle Groom survived to tell this story of addiction and her descent into hell is a miracle--but so is the deep wide lyrical profundity of the writing--writing as thrilling and moving as the story is redemptive and light-giving. The effect this book had on me is no different from the one I had when I found my first poem, while leafing through the Book of Knowledge in my childhood home. It was by Wordsworth and my heart stopped as I realized without the words to say: that the smallest moments can hold such meaning, can define without definition, can describe without description what it means to be alive. I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl reminded me of what literature can do."
-- Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars With Boys
"In this glittering fragmented memoir Kelle Groom reveals in brilliant detail how her life changed with the birth of her son, Tom, and how, in the years that followed, he remained, irrevocably, at the centre of everything. These beautiful pages offer a privileged glimpse of a world of secret emotions and thoughts. The reader too emerges transformed."
-- Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and The House on Fortune Street
"In language as precise and sparkling as the tip of a razor against your skin, Kelle Groom offers an unflinching portrait of a mother yearning for the infant son she gave up for adoption and then lost to leukemia. As honest and moving a memoir as I've ever read."
--Will Allison, author of Long Drive Home
ON SPILL (ANHINGA PRESS 2017)
"There is an untrammelled and bounding energy that resists constraint in Kelle Groom’s latest book of poetry, Spill. Groom seems undaunted by multiplicity—in fact, she dives over and over into the seas of multiple realities, unimpeded by conventional boundaries. Her work inhabits a full spectrum of experience, with no sense of stepping into or out of a tidy middleclass existence. It is an all-embracing wash of realities.
In the opening poem, “The Lost Museum,” there is the fervent if troubling line, “If someone must saw open / my chest I want all this light to be what spills out.” There is not only the presumption that life might or must involve someone sawing open one’s chest, but also the enlightened vision about what the speaker hopes she harbors.
This early and literal mention of spilling is passive, as the collection also contains poems in which the spill of language is actively engaged. In “L’Amoureuse,” a rhythmic incantation of anaphoras enumerates what “she has.” A deceptively adorable spill of incisive comparisons expresses, then, seemingly, normalizes, one’s profound insecurities:
She has the breaking point of my hard plastic pink flipflops
She has the hypnosis of my shuffle to the kitchen for coffee
She has the conversation of my black caterpillars in their fur
coats, curling uncurling by the door last winter,
hello, hello
Then, suddenly, the speaker summarizes them:
She has the song and dance of my rage turned against the self
The way Groom equates the quotidian and the submerged is striking. There is no marked division of the register shift, from morning kitchen coffee to rage against the self.
In an early interview, Groom remembered her first encounter with Jayne Anne Phillips’ work and her own sense that she had previously lived in a house with closed windows. While reading Phillips’ book, “shutter after shutter opened.” That is this reviewer’s experience with Groom’s book. My own dutiful avoidance of risk was spilled over and revealed as a rigidity that limits encounter with life.
That spill connotes the motion of liquid is appropriate. There is tension in the book between (perhaps impermanent) stasis and motion. One can detect this dynamic even in the number of locations—they are often emotional states given place, then inhabited on multiple levels.
In the spirit of listing, here are some poem titles in the book that allude to location:
The Lost Museum,
St. Petersburg
Helltown
Shark Bite Capital of America
The Anti-Suicide Hotel
The Nun Hotel
Community Sleep Disorder Clinic
South Station, 1968
Hôtel Dieu
These titles refer to places of ruin, of transience, and in some instances, unexpected transcendence. Though, in Groom’s hands, this is felt first as a vivid awareness of the temporary thereness of objects, and simultaneously, as an eventual and even longed for spilling into a vastness of ocean.
In the shapely stanzaic poem, “Estate,” which seems to itemize objects as in a sale, the list of objects includes the following:
someone turns
a teapot, tries to read the message on the bottom.
The box at my feet looks familiar,
Labeled “Writing” in purple magic marker.
Poems I’d written on envelopes, bills
The end of the poem offers this perspective:
but there are thousands of lives getting ready
to push toward the hush over head, the raft
of weeds. I move a coconut out of their way,
clear the main drag down to the sea.
Here, even in these lines extracted from the poem, one sees vivid temporality. The very premise of the estate sale objects severed from their origins allows for momentary nostalgia. However, that halting the motion of time long enough to notice that the marker is “purple” and “magic,” for instance, is always in the context of continual motion “to the sea.”
The domains of the poems are temporary locations on the way somewhere. Or, perhaps, on the way to not being somewhere known.
In “Booby Trap,” the speaker reveals:
I liked to purposefully
get lost in cities turned around
I thought that if I paid no attention
to the streets signs I could run into my life by surprise the one
that always hid from me in my horizontal parallel existence
Many of the poems feel autobiographical, about running toward life. The speaker is sometimes a waitress, often on the road, sometimes alone in diners, once with a stranger who “wanted to show me a building that appeared thin / as a credit card, or with a dark hole through the center.” The speaker of these poems is intrepid. She goes where she sees to go. She is not constrained by self-imposed restrictions, at least not in the narratives that emerge in flashes in these poems. There is an absence of hesitation, a spilling over into whatever fascinates, what is alluring. A shadowy cast of characters inhabits the poems, a “friend not quite / My friend.” In the case of “The Anti-Suicide Hotel,” “I thought it was the Suicide / Hotel. Waking, / I knew I had to find it.”
This poetry is self-aware, skillful, and reveals a honed attention to language and its origins and resonances. Take, for instance, the haunting poem “Hour,” in which the sound of the word, rendered as “Ow wah” evokes a beloved and deceased uncle who called it that, as well as a whole desolate and almost howling world, “in need of a blanket, everything cut and named.”
Groom’s work remains dauntlessly free-floating. As the final stanzas of this daring collection announce in “Hôtel Dieu,” she
could glide
into the ocean, seagulls carrying stars
in their mouths, dropping them from the sky
to crack open on the sea round rocks, the path
leading into the horizon not here,
invisible, but I can feel it saying, come along.
And so we would “come along” with Groom, into her fully felt worlds, towards them, without prejudice, without even knowing where we are led, with an almost quiet unflinching faith.
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, Los Angeles Review
ON FIVE KINGDOMS (ANHINGA PRESS, JAN 1, 2010):
Kelle Groom's poems are like underwater songs, sung from the submerged continent of the inner life, the life we don't often expose to the outer world, the one we don't speak of. They have the bemused slightly sad knowledge of lived life, but mainly, these poems come from the muse of soulfulness, they are "tender-minded" -- they balance honesty with perceptiveness of others, which is the true sign of tenderness. They are wry, artful, sad, loving, and moving. A true pleasure. -- Tony Hoagland
Kelle Groom's new book, "Five Kingdoms," attempts to categorize the world, make sense of its violence, loss, and beauty. Groom makes the unbearable bearable through lists, ekphrasis, wild associations, and ritual. Her poetry cross-references politics, biology, history, domesticity, and war. Her work glows with her spirit and intellect, explodes with joy and grief. "Five Kingdoms" sings with what it is to be human. -- Denise Duhamel
"The Best New Poetry": Groom likes to set vivid scenes - a fireman speeding to an emergency, a hitchhiker risking a dangerous ride - and then lift them into poetic bliss. She's also capable of flights of fancy that end up unexpectedly moving. Example: "Oprah and the Underworld," in which the poet describes an interview Winfrey conducted with Sharon Stone. The actress talks about a "head injury," and Groom is ultimately entranced by "Sharon saying how near it all was/the nearness of death...Death, another guest."
-- Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, April 16, 2010
"The poems in Kelle Groom's third collection, Five Kingdoms, weave gracefully between the personal and the political, wrestling larger cultural crises down to their human components."..."These poems urge us toward greater understanding, toward compassion, toward a greater sense of responsibility for our own and others' actions."..."This ultimately human need to connect, to comfort, even across millions of years, becomes the driving force of Five Kingdoms."..."It is rare to find such a range of emotion, intellect and humor housed in one poet-but here it is, and it is a gift. Groom's is a fiercely intelligent, defiant voice, singing with all her passion and formidable insight."
-- Ilyse Kusnetz, The Florida Review, 2011
"Five Kingdoms" by Kelle Groom, "based on the five kingdoms of life which categorize every living thing" (105) is a stunning collection of poems.
-- Poets' Quarterly, Winter 2011
ON LUCKILY (Anhinga Press, 2006):
In Kelle Groom's "Luckily," tenderness transforms violence: "A kiss on a cigarette burn." In poems both mysterious and candid, Groom captures domesticity and dream, internal and external landscapes, addiction and recovery. Groom is pitch perfect when it comes to emotional nuance. She constructs flawless images about our miraculous, vulnerable bodies. "Luckily" is a fierce and important book. -- Denise Duhamel
Kelle Groom's exhilarating poems put human intoxicants (like love) close to hand. As they sweep a sometimes painful burden of experience along one unforeseeable line after another, they also offer a crash course in how, when forgetting's not an option, memory takes another deep breath and works like mercy. -- Terri Witek
Kelle Groom has the eye for image, the ear for music, and the finger to turn words into gold nuggets. "Underwater City" is a phenomenal first collection of poetry, and "Luckily" takes us to a higher peak. -- Wang Ping
ON UNDERWATER CITY (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA, 2004):
"Underwater City" is a book of gifts and revelations. Kelle Groom becomes a poet we can trust as we await surprise after surprise. Reading this book encourages the heart of the reader to believe, once again, in the majestic environment created from great poetic achievement."--Ray Gonzalez
"Tender, mysterious, grieving yet good-natured, Kelle Groom's poems reach to the heart. "Underwater City" is a marvelous collection, at once various and centered, often focusing on the subject of family. If you have ever been a member of one, you will recognize and appreciate the redemptive grace with which she writes."--Kelly Cherry
"Kelle Groom's beautiful poems are haunted by a rare intuition, a sense that things are more than what they appear."--Malena Morling
The Missouri Review (online)
"Underwater City" introduces us to a voice that is both ghost-like and full of wonder. Her imagery is as fantastical and as clear as Magritte's." "At times, Groom's poems are so powerful that they seem to touch at undiscovered emotional centers that both shake and comfort us."
Southern Humanities Review
"Groom skillfully connects loves to losses, generations to one another, and oceans near and distant. . . Each poem offers exceptional craftsmanship, precisely rendered emotions, and haunting images."
New York Times Book Review
"Groom proceeds--headlong, staggering and every now and then stumbling onto something extraordinary."
"...on closer inspection they [Kelle Groom's poems] start to look like another genre altogether -- something almost pre-prosaic. Many are explicitly about dreams, and even those that aren't tend to follow a dream logic and employ a dream syntax. Their fundamental unit is neither the line nor the sentence, but the thought."
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