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.
ISBN: 9781556597268
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“What vitality in these poems that are full of wild and wonderful metaphors and deft, surprising leaps. There are aching love poems and poems that speak to the ache of living: ‘Tonight, ache has a name/and it’s called existence.’ There are poems that mourn for the desecration of the earth: ‘Tonight, I’m wearing sorrow like a corset/you keep trying to unhook.’ And there are witty observations about life and poetry: ‘When in doubt—add plums to your poem,/ never break a line on a bird’s name.’ I have a soft spot for poems that press pain up against humor and these poems are brilliant at that. Accidental Devotions is serious and delicious. Just what we need in these challenging times.”—Ellen Bass
“To say that Accidental Devotions is passionate would be to say the truth—but what does that mean? Poems herein aren’t afraid to take a public bus, like surrealist angels. In this America of ours, where loneliness is a statistical fact, a poem isn’t shy to admit: ‘I am wearing sorrow like a corset / you keep trying to unhook.’ If the word ‘passionate’ is to be used to describe this book, one must add that such passion carries ‘grief in a paper bag / with tiny handles.’ These blessed tools of craft used here—tone and image—deliver us into the many lives of the heart, showing how we love, and why, even if ‘ache has a name /and it’s called existence.’ And, despite it all, an older couple, on the dance floor, keeps dancing ‘unaware / the music has ended—how they sway’ into each other, letting the quiet lead. This is a brave book, one that shows us there is nothing accidental about Kelli Russell Agodon’s devotions—but as we turn the pages, our own devotions might, perhaps, deepen. Bravo.”—Ilya Kaminsky
“Reading the poems in Accidental Devotions is a form of flight. Agodon’s mind and heart move quick, and these poems are full of verve, humor, passion, and a deep and abiding joy. Each one is a tour de force of falling apart and falling back in love with our gorgeous and complicated world. This book is simultaneously a votive on the of altar of the ordinary and also kissing Dickinson and Rilke in a cemetery filled with feathers. I am a devotee of each of these erotic, botanical, angelic lines, each one pressed and saved like any beauty you wish to hold forever. Read these poems. Let everything in.”—Traci Brimhall
“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