Utopic

“Keelan’s poetic, as capacious as it is exacting, defies easy categorization: her epistemological, ethical, and spiritual acuity permeates poems that are as attentive to the physical world as they are to the paradoxes of our failures to represent it. . . . The exhilarating surprise in these poems is the ardor with which she savors the sonorous and sensual within the very language of our failures, the zeal with which she teaches us to glean.” —<em>Rain Taxi</em> “Each world is a room, each room is a world, and Keelan’s poetry—through syntax, typography, verb tense, and images—brings us toward the realization that our being in the world is our realizing the world in every being . . . Keelan’s book accomplishes a glorious synthesis of spiritual, political, and philosophical traditions that emphasize unity, openness, and love with a poetic tradition that has frequently been thought of as exclusionary and difficult.” —<em>Boston Review</em> “This profoundly moving book is fact of a consummate skill and the human possibilities it works to realize and to honor. In these poems Claudia Keelan keeps the faith for us all.” —Robert Creeley “These are beautiful, anguished political poems. They emerge from a Southern past, and a Western desert present in whose palpable solitude Keelan writes for both herself and the many. Her language, as language, is intended to create change through a deliberate evenhanded musicality; but the poems are also desert-air-clear as to meaning. Utopic is an unanticipated accomplishment.” —Alice Notley