Spring 2025

Rebuilding Year

With

Katherine Streeter

Donika Kelly

Profile picture of Dilettante Army Author Donika Kelly

DONIKA KELLY is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She currently lives in Iowa City, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Photo credit: Ladan Osman

Palinode: Centaur

In her palinode–a poetic form of retraction–Donika Kelly contemplates the hybridity of memory and correction’s possibilities and foreclosures. The metaphor that does the heavy lifting in this poem is the centaur: half horse, half human, a creature of bodily hungers demanding satisfaction and slant longings for wisdom.

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