Books

Rise Above the River

“Lucifer, Ismene, Alexander the Great; ‘an obscure Civil War hero,’ a Florida railroad, ‘the dead middle of the Mississippi;’ an apron swaying and twisting on a clothesline – with these figures and images, as well as with letters and visits, memories and dreams, Kelly Rowe enables us to assemble a story that can’t  be told directly,  to compose a picture that can’t be faced head-on. And the limpid diction and confiding tone of Rise Above The River both soften and strengthen a narrative voice that finds many ways to tell the ineffable.”

—Rachel Hadas, author of Love and Dread, (Measure Press, Inc. 2021)

“From personal recounting and reflection to rethinking classical mythology, this collection presents an eclectic, engaging contemplation throughout, underscored by a haunting and often surprising rhyme that ties us doubly to the moment we are reading.  In reading these poems, we are so often starkly surprised by the strong, sure leaps—“Snow falling. / Her white feet. / Her aria.”  Sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly, these poems lead us into their important mix.  The several reconciliations at the end draw these poems into closing, but in their moment they gift us with a persuasive sense of greater connection to things simply and innately significant—underscored by profound feeling. “

—Alberto Rios, Poet Laureate of Arizona, author of Not Go Away is My Name (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Winner of the 2021 Able Muse book award,

Finalist, 2024 Arizona Book Award for Poetry

Child Bed Fever

Selected for publication in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series

Seven Kitchens Press, 2022

Flying South on the Back of a Dove

“These graceful, accomplished poems lay claim to a specific terrain—to dailyness as it inhabits the present and the past, whether a wagon train in history or a bedside table with today’s items on it. The language here is often daring, the syntax ambitious in its reach and the tone exact and exacting. These are poems to read and remember.”

—Eavan Boland

“Keenly seen, wondrously precise, achingly humane, Kelly Rowe’s poems soar, whether she is celebrating a lost father, singing of a southern childhood of gravity and grace, probing the intimate risks of love, or evoking the pained choices of those alive at society’s margins. Every poem in Flying South on the Back of a Dove is held aloft by the poet’s generous and sustaining eye, ear, and heart, as she offers us ‘provisions of grief,’ asks us to find hope in the ‘red flash rising, a burst/in the black expanse,’ and encourages us ‘to embrace the earth.’”

—David Groff, author of Clay

Published January 2019, Texas Review Press