The New World
The New World
by Kelly Schirmann
Softcover / 152 p. / Poetry & Prose
ISBN: 978-1-939568-35-9
A hybrid collection of poetry and prose, The New World follows the attempts, failures, and re-attempts at understanding and articulating an era of immense social upheaval, political corruption, and environmental consequence. In five distinct sections, the book refracts, explores and investigates these global themes through the realm of the personal and private. Old journals and notes are revisited as a way of understanding the self and its various revisions and mistakes.
The New World tells the story of escapism and arrival, growth and decay, and despair and optimism as they occur, often simultaneously, within the mind of our narrator. The book asks, “How do you write poems in a country like this?”, inviting every reader to take stock of themselves, and to reassess the ways “One human world / [empties] completely / into the bigger one.”
“Through poetry and essay, Schirmann weaves sentimentality, irreverence, wit, politics, reflection, research, and philosophy into one harmonious soundtrack of our complicated, modern lives. In lesser hands, the result would be cacophony, but Schirmann’s brilliance alone is convincing connective tissue.”
“[Schirmann] is a striving, musical mystic whose struggle is worked out right on the bandstand. The scope of her energies and the gut-bucket improvisation places her more in the realm of Coltrane and Ayler than anything a pop star would recognize.”
“Kelly Schirmann’s The New World begins with the idea that what we need right now isn’t poetry, but livable wages, ethical accountability, and less consumer-friendly “revolutions” from the arts. It’s an exhortation that doesn’t allow her work to be read with any kind of aesthetically-cushioned escapism, like most poetry does. Because of this, her New World is a heartbreaking alarm. These poems are loud, baying, and bend new light into my eyes. She’s made a siren beautiful. I have no idea how, but I love it.”
“What amazes me about Kelly’s latest work is how it begins in sense-making, argument, discourse, and section by section deconstructs itself so that only the essences of language remain—a fragment here, the lone image of the mythic apple there. It gives me a feral feeling, like language is being dissolved of its centuries of pollution and toxic chalk and returning to a wilderness of its own ungovernable energy. It’s a book that’s here to do that work.”
