Who Was I to Say I Was Alive

2015 Chapbook Runner-up

By Kelly Nelson

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The pretexts of Kelly Nelson’s poems—a young girl learning to shoot, seeing a colleague holding hands with a woman not his wife, reading a prison inmate’s poems—are in themselves charismatic. But what really distinguishes Who Was I to Say I Was Alive are the ways that casual tonalities, economical images, sudden small movements, surprising disclosures or refusals to disclose, all act to put pressure on the poems’ anecdotal surfaces. And then the same elements act as relief valves. In poem after poem you feel you’ve been through something. Put another way, these poems are little bombs going off. Or surprise packages left at the door.

–Daisy Fried, author of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice