Alive the Whole Time

In 1978, Audre Lorde stood before the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Mount Holyoke College to deliver her talk “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” The Berkshire Conference, an organization for women historians, was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and more than 1,200 people were in attendance. The weather was cool that day in late August, lightly breezy. In Mount Holyoke’s cutting garden, the Japanese anemone bloomed. With only a smattering of husbands or children in sight, a summer weekend dedicated to the communal engagement of women seemed an ideal setting for Lorde to champion women’s erotic wellsprings as sources of creative fecundity, pleasure, and joy. While urging the women in attendance to privilege embodied knowledge that would create space for solace and comfort, as well as inspiration and activism, Lorde elaborated:

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial . . . And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

Lorde’s sentiment could be the epigraph to Donika Kelly’s third poetry collection, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025), a book chronicling the pleasures that lie on the other side of survival. Sapphic love, art, and kinship are just some of the spoils of living that “knock and knock” our narrator’s “heart’s red muscle” and make her “happy, sometimes, to be alive.”

The erotic—both sexual and ekphrastic—informs the scope of the book, which is about connection: carnal, creative, or otherwise. In the penultimate poem, “What Is the Measure,” the speaker regards her lover:

    Your arm, nearly as long as mine, your palm, 
wider, your mouth a beginning, your eyes, of course, 
that against which everything else is measured. 

You harrow and the summit writhes; 
your broad foot falls, and the field, akimbo, gives up 
its gravity, lets loose its bodies its bones, 
thrums an animating light.

To be in communion with the lover demands a careful and caring attention that inevitably extends to the way one approaches the world. By considering the corporeal body, the body of the earth, we open ourselves to all that exists around us without a fixed focal point. Such a capacious purview erodes the boundaries between one body and another, as when the world “writhes,” all its features “akimbo” just like the women entwined. This mode of seeing is like Annie Dillard’s in her memoir Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974): “there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied.” Formally intimating this rippling outward, Kelly’s movement from tercet to quatrain is a “loose[ning]” of the stanza, as well as of light and sensation. So, too, does the enjambment let go of any one fixed meaning toward the end of Kelly’s poem. To wit, while “gives up” initially offers a (mis)reading of defeat, Kelly quickly reasserts “gives up” as something closer to abandonment—in other words, to willingly relinquish gravity, one participates in a voluntary surrender echoing Dillard’s own “transfixed and emptied” experience.

Kelly is one of the most critically-acclaimed American poets of the last decade. Her first book, Bestiary (2016), won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, while her second, The Renunciations (2021), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Poetry. The Natural Order of Things almost feels like the final clasp in a tertiary necklace of collections that share similar themes, topics, and even poem titles. Though her first two collections also explore love, family, and the natural world, Kelly’s newest work evinces a tonal and formal release. Where in Bestiary “some of the poems sit squat in the middle of the page like something you could throw and break a window with,” as Nikky Finney notes in that book’s introduction, in The Natural Order of Things almost all the poems “fall down the page like the ladder required to climb inside that broken window.” These new poems are comfortable taking up space on the page, as well as branching into new emotional terrain.

“Brood,” the book’s first poem, is a cascade of images that Kelly immediately alters or rewords, as if writing too fast: “My chest is earth // I mean to write my chest is warm / but earth will do / to exhume a heart // Breathe // I meant to write / beat // Did you know I was alive the whole time.” The short, staccato lines create another kind of heartbeat on the page, tumbling in propulsive, intuitive leaps toward the healing directive “Breathe.” Here the warm, animal body of our speaker asserts her aliveness. Even as the cold ground of winter causes “torpor,” the speaker reminds herself, “Spring is coming // I mean // I push the wet dirt with my mandible // I mean jaw // Jaw // Y’all.” The Southern vernacular “y’all” nods to the origin of poetry as an oral tradition; Kelly’s poems live in the mouth, not just on the page. The pleasure of speaking her words aloud reasserts our own aliveness, too.

Kelly also affirms and celebrates her existence in “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” This poem shares the same title as the concluding poem in The Renunciations, but the two are stylistically different. While the Renunciations version is composed of four tercets, the Natural Order poem alternates between couplets and tercets, adding an additional rhythm and texture to the page. Additionally, every stanza but one is closed in the earlier poem, whereas only two of 10 stanzas are closed in the latest. One’s breath carries across each stanza in Kelly’s newest iteration rather than halting at each break. Such a technical choice suggests an expansiveness of thought rather than a clipped approach controlled by tension, fear, or exhaustion. While The Renunciations concludes with the lines, “About time / to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw,” in the Natural Order, that work has long been completed. “The home” being made inside the speaker is now furnished: roomy, warm, and, above all, lived in.

The Natural Order version of “The moon rose over the bay” opens, “I am taken with the hot animal / of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs // and have them move as I intend, though / my knee, though my shoulder, though something / is torn or tearing.” As the speaker observes a dozen dead squid scattered along the shore, she “write[s] [her] name in the sand: / Donika Kelly.” Despite the squid’s detritus, the speaker writes her name in the sand to share in the surrounding creatures’ space. Even in the midst of environmental destruction, Kelly finds beauty. “To the ditch lily I say I am in love,” she writes. “To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow / street I am in love. To the roses, white // petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined / pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am // in love.” The line break on “I am” recalls the moment in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) when Esther Greenwood swims out into the ocean to see if she might drown. At the last minute she changes her mind and chants I am I am I am all the way back to shore. But what Kelly’s enjambment showcases is the difference in tenor between surviving and thriving. In this new iteration of “The moon rose over the bay,” the narrator doesn’t just exist—she luxuriates in her body, her name, and the natural world, all inflected with the rosy hue of love.

The succeeding poem, “After Scissoring for the First Time at Thirty-Three,” reads like an extension of the previous, through Kelly’s continued motif of water as a means toward embodiment and joy. Here we are present with the beloved as the speaker marvels at “a new alchemy, / flesh to water, // how you turned me / into the ocean // you rose out of / and over, turned me // and O what wave / I became.” The short couplets intimate the proximity of the lovers’ bodies, slipping in and out of one another, slick with sweat. In their union, they (re)make the world anew as the beloved “rode and rode // toward a horizon, / which was / the curvature of me.” The power of their shared erotics inspires the speaker to muse:

. . . If I could,
I would paint you,
  
would title the painting:
Manatee Cresting
  
or Still Life with Dolphin
or Recall the Flying Fish
  
near Catalina Island,
so as not to say:
 
imagine a sea
painting the nymph
 
who rides
its warmest current.

Sex is also art, as well as a form of communion. In “The Bone Museum,” from earlier in the book, Kelly writes, “I didn’t come for the bones / but for the ripple of kinship,” and the ripple of kinship is always within reach in the world of Kelly’s new book. The Natural Order of Things reveals that living is infinitely more pleasurable when we don’t do it alone.

While the beloved is a central figure in these poems, so, too, is family. A phone call with grandpa eventually “leave[s] what is forgotten / behind us easily enough, detour / through what rough country he can recall,” and great-grandma Juel shares stories of great-grandpa Zach, “A rough husband, / hard-fisted, slurred.” Though family can be a source of solace, it is also not without violence or threat; in addition to Zach, there is rapacious cousin T Baby, who has a “mouth / like a old grave.” For better or worse, the roots of Kelly’s family tree extend their narrative branches through these pages, as our speaker pieces together the oral histories informing her past.

This scattering of names between and among poems evokes what Aracelis Girmay calls the “constellatory thinking” of Lucille Clifton’s writing, “where every thing is kin” (How to Carry Water: Selected Poems, 2020). Even the animals in The Natural Order of Things become kindred and contextualize our speaker’s understanding of herself, as in “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things,” in which Kelly watches a newly born hippo “stumbling and new in its enclosure.” As the poem concludes, Kelly writes, “Hippo baby, little river horse, / you should be in a river. // O Donika, you should be in love.” In “Self-Portrait: A Triptych,” a later poem, “The animals that come to live as my body . . . rest with no mind to govern the slackened / limbs, the automatic breath and blink.” Once again, Kelly confirms we are all connected: woman, flora, and fauna.

Kelly’s appreciation of all the ways in which we are intertwined means everything creatively informs her work. Poems across the book reference the Metropolitan Opera’s 2008 production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the Guggenheim’s exhibition Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction (2022), and Whitney Houston. Various “Self-Portrait” poems also demonstrate how art helps us understand ourselves and our bodies as works of art, too. In “Self-Portrait as a Woman Who Kneels over Her Beloved’s Face,” the speaker asks that her congress be concretized. “Be sure to capture / my body bent forward / in supplication,” Kelly writes, “my hands holding // the back of her head, / and my body bent back, / mouth open, a sapling in wind.”

Returning to Audre Lorde, the forebear of self-love and self-appreciation, Kelly writes in “Major Arcana”: “Oh Audre, / at times I have called on you / as others might a power / higher than their own.” When we venture into the world “with a soft heart,” we carry with us all the histories that inform us, all the ripples of kinship that have crystallized around our identity. The meaning of kinship in The Natural Order of Things is a generous one by which affinity—not just blood—defines family. Within these pages Kelly regards oceanfront and museums, farmland and bedrooms in order to find her beloved, her friends, and her kin. Art, animals, and other writers become the teachers that guide her over this gentle and sloping terrain. Kelly continues in “Major Arcana”:

                                           . . . Oh 
     Lorde, who might 
have walked alongside me, 
   mouth a firm line when I ask 
      how to bear this loneliness, 
         this ache, who might 
respond: Exquisitely, 
with excellent, with chaos, 
with whatever yellow 
light you’ve got.

The line break “Oh / Lorde” right on the heels of the lines “I have called on you / as others might a power / higher than their own” makes a homonym of Lorde (Lord), alchemizing her name into something holy.

How else but holy to describe all the figures and entities Lorde encounters through The Natural Order of Things? By which I mean sacred. If the baby hippo reminds Kelly of the necessity of love, and the dead squids blotted with flies reminds her that she has, indeed, found love, then nothing must be overlooked in the pursuit of happiness or home. As anyone who has suffered profound loss or trauma knows, happiness is never a guarantee, nor is it achievable as a permanent state of being. But it is possible to practice the art of love and appreciation in perpetuity. That we can do. Donika Kelly’s rich and moving collection revels in the big and small moments that make life worth living, reminding us how profoundly grateful one can be “That such happiness could have happened at all.”