Unbalancing Act

M.M. Kelly

Unbalancing Act is a haunting collection of poems about the particular physics of loving and losing-—about the way grief, desire, memory, and awe can tip a life off its axis, and right it again. The speaker moves through fire and water, childhood, intimacy and abandonment, always with one eye on the natural world: bears, whales, rivers, storms, animals sleeping in impossible ways. The poems are lyric but narrative-driven, often darkly funny, and fascinated—bordering on obsessed—with the strange facts and small surrealities that make ordinary life feel mythic.

At its heart, the book is about imbalance as a kind of truth: the way trauma warps time, the way love can feel like weather, the way the body keeps trying to survive even when the mind wants to disappear. It’s a collection for readers who like their beauty a little feral—poems that are tender but not precious, intelligent but not academic, and emotionally sharp without ever losing their sense of wonder.

“On Particle Physics.”

So much talk of outer
space, but what of inner
space, inner spaces-

of the wildernesses between
atoms, between thoughts,
between savaging dreams.

For you-the war, the father,
the fire, the wife. For me-
the brother, the brother.

Loss makes us paper
cups with puncture wounds.
Cups that will never quite

fill. Running water is
required.
You, my running water.