Kevin McLellan (Poetry) | Cambridge, MA

Kevin McLellan is the author of Ornitheology (The Word Works, forthcoming 2018), Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, forthcoming 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems have appeared in numerous journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, and Witness. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Books

Chapbooks / Book Arts Projects

• Hemispheres (Fact-Simile, 2018). [book arts object]. Poetry
• [box] (letter [r] press, 2016). [book arts object]. Poetry.
• Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). [chapbook]. Poetry.

Press & Reviews

The poems of Kevin McLellan’s highly accomplished first collection are haunting and elliptical but never oblique or encoded. Lightning flashes of insight, memory, elegy, and stern self-reckonings illuminate the horizons of these poems, which are unsettling and ecstatic by turns. These are the poems of ‘polysemy without mask’ that Paul Celan strove to write, and Kevin McLellan is a poet of singular promise.
—David Wojahn

Writing with a matrix of loss, Tributary begins where language is most labile and finds manifest reasons for praise. Here is a blueprint of what I can only call the partiality of human experience, where time and perception offer moments, never totalities, of individual purpose for existing. If it is true ‘that a you doesn’t / exist, and one hundred / and two times over / faith is lost’ (“Hands: A Tribute”), it is equally true that these poems pay homage to the nature of that secondary state, where faith is as often found. Locating the tribute inside of Tributary, this book is an impressive debut, and Kevin McLellan might well be a Heraclitus for the twenty-first century.
—Claudia Keelan

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