Kelle Groom

Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections, a memoir, and an essay collection. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and recipient of two Florida Book Awards in poetry, Groom has served as nonfiction editor of AGNI Magazine and poetry editor of The Florida Review. Her work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Groom was previously distinguished writer-in-residence and assistant professor of humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and director of programs at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She now lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Book of Miracles

Poems

By Kelle Groom

“Sometimes it’s hard to know a miracle / is a miracle.” Book of Miracles, Kelle Groom’s fifth poetry collection seeks commonplace or hidden miracles. These poems are an exploration of mystery and longing. The speaker’s experience of alcoholism and recovery propels a desire for transformation. The natural world also opens to the miraculous. Some poems are whirls, almost dervish, in which the speaker transforms into something/someone else—another form, multiple selves, changeable states.

While exploring the idea that if one pays attention, the unseen will reveal itself, the speaker is keenly aware of the time she lives in and the great human suffering which many in power dismiss and hide. The speaker trusts her own eyes, and the power of seeing. Throughout Book of Miracles, Groom invites us to see the miracles around and in ourselves.