These Are The Gloria Stories

Poetry. Kelin Loe's debut collection of poems offers a voice so quick it transfers heat: "What you call losing / your virginity I call every other day." THESE ARE THE GLORIA STORIES bristles with kinetic energy. The collection's four extended suites atomize and collide with each other in colorful pyrotechnic displays. Simultaneously gracious and playful, curious and knowing, these poems jolt across boisterous domestic odysseys with brassy rhetoric. "I mean I can candle, Kelin Loe's speaker half promises, half warns at the outset of THESE ARE THE GLORIA STORIES, and she does. Flame-tipped, flicker- framed, luminous, and combustible these poems harness something almost otherworldly, something ultra-worldly, in their word-storm. Sometimes we are spellbound by so-called story, sometimes by so-called beauty—and both have their place here—but in this astonishing work, we are caught up in something stranger, a spell more direct, more radical. If you think you know what language is capable of, if you think you know its best dance moves and fondest secrets by heart, think again. Think through Loe's poems—follow their futurecome, their trail of sugar—and with them, engage sense and sensation in a different kind of conversation than you've ever had before: here circle that nerve."—Lisa Olstein "Kelin Loe's poems are fierce in their truthfulness. They won't let up or give way. They wring the truth from every syllable as if dying for water. They have in them something we're all after."—James Tate "Suppose every word spoken or whispered or shouted by humans since humans began using words were collected solemnly and guarded sacredly and still could not be preserved or contained—THE GLORIA STORIES would pick up the pieces for us and give us masterfully and sacramentally, with ardent attention to every one of our facets, an aggregation and celebration of who we've been and who we might become. Nothing is lost on Loe, poetry and we poetry readers gain everything."—Dara Wier