Closing the Distance, Emerging from the Earth

Nathan Xavier Osorio finds pain and tenderness in Donika Kelly’s newest poetry collection.

By Nathan Xavier OsorioNovember 29, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

HOW DO WE come to love ourselves when our sense of self is fraught? In her third book of poems, The Natural Order of Things (2025), Donika Kelly uses the lyric to understand the depths of this question by reaching for family, lovers, friends, and the natural world. This community-turned-ecosystem contextualizes, soothes, and transforms a self caught in the long shadow of childhood abuse.

In her first two collections, Bestiary (2016) and The Renunciations (2021), Kelly’s unflinching poetic voice built a brutal mythology into and out from these traumas. In Natural Order, the possibility of connection between bodies—humans, animals, even plants—offers outlets for not only memory, desire, and pleasure but also doubt, grief, and astonishment. Kelly’s hypnotic control of breath and the poetic line reveal the nuances and rigor of survival while giving readers portrait after portrait of yet another kind of personal mythology—one that reckons with what it means to recover a damaged sense of self, all the while asking if it’s ever possible to end and begin again. The natural world is more than a conceit in these poems: it becomes the poet’s intimate interlocutor.

The opening lines of the first poem, “Brood,” emerge from the earth like a cicada: “My chest is earth // I meant to write my chest is warm / but earth will do.” Hearkening back to Kelly’s critically acclaimed debut, built around a series of self-portraits as mythological creatures, the speaker here closes the distance between the self and the natural world by becoming other-than-human: “I mean / Spring is coming / I mean / I push the wet dirt with my mandible / I mean jaw.” The speaker’s proximity to nature shifts throughout these poems but never detaches completely, revealing how the arbitrary divide between humanity and nature only further alienates us from what might anchor us.

Kelly powerfully blurs the web of living things with the experience of living with complex trauma. In two poems titled “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things,” the speaker witnesses a hippo born prematurely at the Cincinnati Zoo and an octopus kept in a jar. Through Kelly’s crystalline language, these observations lead to an exploration of estrangement and longing: “Hippo baby, little river horse, / you should be in a river,” the speaker notes in the earlier poem, while she asks in the other, “What have they taught you to settle for?” These inquiries mirror the yearning central to this collection, a yearning to travel from a place of suffering to a home that offers both validation and benediction.

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With precision and what feels like magic, Kelly’s images massage people into animal, land, and seascape. In an early love poem, “Self-Portrait as a Body, a Sea,” Kelly asks, “Now aren’t I a humming thing?” to which the beloved responds, “Yes, […] a body of oceans / and marvelous.” If this collection is an illustration of the astonishing capacity for connection between bodies, then it is also a portrait of doubts that undercut even our most triumphant moments of recognizing ourselves in burgeoning love. That marvelous body of oceans is swept away by Kelly’s subsequent image: “And the sea anemone in me, / growing on the wreckage / of an old ship— // can they grow that way, / I wonder, on an ending—” Kelly reminds us that the work of the poet is not just to reveal beauty and music in language but also to listen carefully and enact contemplation on the page.

Throughout the collection, the speaker returns to many sites of emergence and origin, reflecting, for instance, on maternal ancestry or a family home of “twenty acres of Arkansas backwoods, / those pastures and good timber a mile / down Columbia County Road 14”—a home named “Sixteen Center” by a great-grandfather’s “drunk whimsy and charisma.” Again, Kelly’s poetic method is to attend to octopus and ancestor alike. Through a maternal patriarch, the speaker absorbs the histories of Black familial resilience from Arkansas to Los Angeles. Through the haze of generational forgetting, the poem’s inquisitive and probing voice remembers what has been lost.

Clustered together, an early suite of poems on family follows the continuity of genealogy (albeit spiked with pain: “In the South, to which I can never return, / I knew a loneliness of onliness”). This need for distance is productively at odds with the longing to return, speaking to the collection’s central tension between connection and disconnection, remembering and forgetting. The passed-down stories of great-grandparents married for over 60 years serve as a blueprint for intimacy that launches the speaker toward emotionally clarifying conclusions: “O Donika, you should be in love.” By invoking the “red dirt” of home and its dynamic ensemble of relatives, the lyric becomes an elixir that mixes memory with intimacy.

In these poems on Southern ancestral lineage, we encounter one of Kelly’s most compelling poetic abilities: her lyric’s embodiment of the human voice. In “Tell It Short,” the speaker recalls a “homeless summer” spent with a late great-grandmother:

And couldn’t Miss Juel talk? And weren’t the stories
always the same—how I know I came honestly
to refrain. Didn’t I come bearing what gifts
could delight, what token I could afford?
Sugar-free peppermints and sugar-free
ice cream, and quick she say, put a piece
in my hand, or put me a little in a bowl.

Kelly’s light-footed rhythm (“Juel Lee, ma’dear, sitting / by the window, peeping the shifting light, calling / who knock when I knocked then stumbled into the house / of cut-off, of scrap lumber, hot and damp / as a mouth” ) and seamless breaking of lines sonically entangle the bodies within her poems, enacting the intimacy of familial closeness. Here, the music of remembered voices turns the memory of Miss Juel into an act of embodiment. The speaker doesn’t just remember the voices of others but also insists they can speak for themselves.

Soon after, we encounter a sprawling three-page poem in a voice that is at once singular and plural, like a Greek chorus. Recounting familial and land history, the gradual rewilding parallels the human connections across generations. Formally distinct from most of the collection, this poem stretches across the page as lines drop, indent, and fragment, inviting us to participate in the release insisted upon by the poem’s titular refrain: “Its gone be what it is.” With end-stopped lines that drum up the poem’s rhythmic tension, along with the repetition of local vernacular that releases the poem’s cascading pace, the utterance becomes a dynamic record of region, labor, and family—and their messy entanglement. As if to balance the possibilities of remembering with the dangers of forgetting, this record culminates in a warning:

        listen,
                                             I’m trying
        to remember, young blood
                                                         forget, and what’s
        loss could gut you like a hog. what it is,
        young blood, is gone, as in pass, as in all
        we have left is what we say, and what we
        say, young blood, before the end and at it,
        is: its gone be what it is.

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One of the strengths of this collection is its depiction of bodies orbiting and encompassing one another. The speaker reasserts herself in ecstatic dialogues between the realms of the platonic and the erotic, the public and the private. In a duet of poems titled “Calling: Always” and “Calling: Marfa,” the poet valorizes Platonic love, blurring the ancestral voice with the response of nature: “I want to call you, to sound // the distance like my grandfather, who / as a child stood on his front porch, hollered / through the woods to his friend a mile, he says, / away, who would call back, echoing in the pine.” The connection between generational memory and the natural world serves once again as a manual of love.

In a series of erotic poems written mostly in balanced tercets and couplets at the center of the collection, the speaker physically metamorphoses from the loneliness of previous lives into natural forms such as water, sapling, and marble. In “After Scissoring for the First Time at Thirty-Three,” sex becomes the ritual and spell that facilitates one of the collection’s primary transformations: “Call it 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.” We see the speaker return to a primordial state where the veil between her body and the lover’s body ripples. The lover becomes a catalyst for a radical blending of interiority and exteriority.

Queer love—in its physical and emotional dimensions—creates the conditions for rapturous embodiment and inches toward liberation from the cycle of forgetting and remembering traumatic histories. In “Grain,” masturbation is not only an act of self-love but also a method for surveying the landscape of the survivor’s soul. Kelly writes, “I’ve been at it for years this body glossed to a high shine / this body polished a stone a line a carapace glistening / in the mulch for decades for a century I come / like ants falling from a tree in early autumn often.” In The Natural Order of Things, we must accept that the landscape, like human history, will never be entirely free from its specters, yet it continues to bud again and again with the promise of pleasure. While we remember pain in both mind and body, we must also insist on tenderness and hope in order to bloom.