Donika Kelly has a system: the award-winning poet and University of Iowa associate professor brings poems to her reader that are accessible and welcoming. Then, they build into an overwhelming and holy crescendo of piercing, evocative vignettes.
Kelly’s latest, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press), is hearty, nourishing. The crescendo in this collection brings you home. Where conflict seems natural, the speaker digests the scene — she understands the situation holistically, sympathetically. Even in more emotionally difficult pieces, Kelly’s exacting language positions the reader to feel kin to the people and places in these poems. She knows how we speak.
Her poetry code-switches. She quietly lets her audience meet her on her terms, which is part of what sets Kelly apart: her voice is her own. Her poems are her own. We might be invited to read it, but if we aren’t part of her world, we’re not going to gain access. That is, unless we’ve ever been in love. Unless we’ve been glad to be alive or stopped for a moment and marveled at the circumstances of the natural world. In “Confronted with the argument of your body–,” one of many love poems, Kelly says, “First, the animal I am, / the approximation of god and machine / that aches and aches / when we are apart,” which feels at once universal and specific and then slides into tribute — not just to the love object, but to the place where sex and love overlap.
Many of the poems are sexual, but more than that they are sensual. They include the reader in the sensory experience of many kinds of arousal.
In the poems early in the book, Kelly shows us the Arkansas landscape and other elements of a life left behind, and the ways it shaped our speaker. We see trees, earth, family members. In “Tell It Short,” she states, “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?”
These sensory experiences guide us to the greater context. All of this exists in one person, maybe in every person. In the poem that takes the collection from climax to denouement (pardon the narrative language), “What I Might Sing,” Kelly brings all of this together — the things our cultures force us to participate in and how it dictates our movements: “I was remembering // America, thinking of you, on my rumble home, / the anthem I used to sing along to, my hand // finding my heart because I was young / and yielded to most things. And still, listen: / Whitney sang the shit out of that song.”
This book is a love letter to where Kelly is from, who she has been, and where and how she has grown. Sensory and wholesome, erotic and comforting, electric and grounded, these poems build a narrative of the ways we live and the ways we love — however that may look, and however hard it may be to look at.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2026 issue.
