Accidental Devotions

Kelli Russell Agodon

Forthcoming May 2026

Cover Design: Gopa and Ted2, Inc. Cover Art: Fatima Ronquillo, Hand with Hummingbirds and Orchids, 2020.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s latest collection, Accidental Devotions, seeks to find meaning in a world lit by screens and haunted by ghosts—both real and digital. Blending humor with vulnerability, these poems embrace the beautiful chaos of our relationships, of aging and being human. Here, explorations of desire, technology, and spirituality ring out like birdsong through a chapel. Sharp and playful, Accidental Devotions is for the quiet rebels and devoted readers—for those who carry ashes to the beach, ask Alexa for guidance, keep Emily Dickinson’s book on the nightstand, or fall in love mid-sentence. With queer tenderness, and an ongoing devotion to desire, these poems make room for grief and joy, pleasure and struggle. The result: a dazzling, defiant field guide to staying human.

Paperback: $17.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556597268

Format: Paperback

Advice

If Emily Dickinson doesn’t appear
in your dreams, you’re not really a poet,

is what a friend told me. Every poet
is a poet, the jasmine pressed.

We were waiting for the bus because
we loved to be driven—like royalty.

We were driven to be surrealist angels,
to float like ink-stained birds

through the pages of our days. Most days,
I longed to live in Paris, 1920s.

Tuberculosis, she said. Don’t leave your life
for your imagination. There’s a mourning

dove circling back to us like a poem.
This morning, someone sent me an email

that read: Advice for New Poets.
It was a sad to-do list:

When in doubt—add plums to your poem,
never break a line on a bird’s name.

In the city, there’s a gentleness in
how the exhaust tries to poison you.

Do you believe every person holds
a sonnet inside them? The dove circled,

circled back. Emily pressed jasmine
from her garden, sent it to Darling Sue.

Instead of death, you should write about desire.
Fall in love with a friend. My stanzas

shadowbox the advice of plums.
The bus arrived late. She placed her hand

in mine. All around us—feathers,
fluttering like unwritten lines.

About the Author

Kelli Russell Agodon is a poet, writer, editor, and book designer. Her previous book, Dialogues with Rising Tides, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award’s Grand Prize in Poetry. Agodon has also published the bestselling The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, which she co-authored with Martha Silano. Her work has received ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award in poetry and has appeared in The Atlantic, New England Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She is …

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Reviews

“Seattle-area poet Agodon’s finely crafted poems gleam like prisms, so clear is her language… The everyday grace with which we attempt to live while tumbling through our days finds expression in this sinewy collection which seems to catch us before we fall, assuring us that it’s going to be okay.”—Booklist

“We know it is treacherous out there, and we know we could benefit from some sort of guide. In this book, Kelli Russell Agodon throws her light around the roiling waters. These poems are keenly attentive, and witty, and wise. They don’t shy away from revealing the dangers this ship we’re in is heading toward, but they’re also not afraid to tell us that they love us. They’ve been constructed to help us. If you let them, they might save you today.”—Camille T. Dungy, Orion Magazine

“'(A)ll objects,’ Kelli Russell Agodon writes, ‘are composed of vibrating anxieties,’ as are these poems, tremulous as a tuning fork, conductive as a lightning rod, teetering between a precarious, hopeful tenderness and dread. There are collisions—’a lightship / crashing against a blue shore of healing’—and gentler dialogues, even poems-as-waltzes, which nonetheless feature inferences of betrayal. The ballast, the queen, is the speaker herself, whose powerful vulnerability is matched only by her wit. ‘At a Cocktail Party, I Am Given a Drink Called, Life is Fleeting and the Olive Is Short-Lived,’ for instance, one in a series of fabulous titles that are poems unto themselves. ‘No one expects perfection, except when they do, which is always,’ she tells us, and I find myself wanting to throw my arm over her shoulder and saying yes, I get it, sister, I know, while we walk down the beach feeling ‘bamboozled / by life,’ discovering the spider building a web in our dead father’s prosthetic leg. This is the book I need right here, right now, as the fires burn and the tides rise.”—Diane Seuss