Kelly DuMar
Poet, Playwright, Workshop Facilitator

Poetry

Poetry & Prose

My new poetry collection, jinx and heavenly calling–I poached a portion of my mother’s love letters to my father, 1953-1954, published by Lily Poetry Review Books, March 2023, is now available for purchase!

ABOUT JINX AND HEAVENLY CALLING

Lusty, vigorous, zestful. It’s hard to imagine our parents in the throes of passion, yet jinx and heavenly calling does just that. DuMar culls original text and graphics from love letters her mother penned to the poet’s father during 1953-1954. From these letters mailed between first date and marriage, DuMar distills her mother’s intimacies, anxieties, and endearments, engaging readers in the captivating dynamic of a couple falling into a 50-year future. 

Available for purchase

at Lily Poetry Review Books

at Amazon

at Barnes & Noble



Opening the Box of Surprise

By Kelly DuMar

About my new poetry collection: jinx and heavenly calling, and how I poached a portion of my mother’s love letters to my father, 1953-1954

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against

The want of you;

Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,

And posting it. . .

~ Excerpt from “The Letter,” by Amy Lowell

 It was a gift I had no expectation of receiving—this box of surprise that came into my hands a few years ago. A lost treasure I had no idea existed in the world. Inside: All the letters, handwritten, that my mother had sent to my father during their courtship, from 1953-1954, starting with their first date and ending soon after they married. . .

CONTINUE READING HERE AT THE JOURNAL OF EXPRESSIVE WRITING


Poems and Prose by Kelly DuMar, upcoming from Nixes Mate Publishing: July 2019

Poems and Prose by Kelly DuMar, upcoming from Nixes Mate Publishing: July 2019

girl in tree bark: poems and prose

by Kelly DuMar

Available Now From Nixes Mate Books: July 2019

“With a poet’s ear and a photographer’s eye, Kelly DuMar has crafted richly detailed poems that capture life’s ordinary moments and turn them into something extra-ordinary. The language in this collection is stunning and rewards multiple readings of each poem. From a mother wrapping her children (the tribe of the poet and her siblings) in winter warmth so they will be “giddy, winging, weightless” to “scattering a parent’s ashes as the adult children “move out from under his cloud,” both loved ones and the natural world are vividly brought to life and raised in transcendence.”

--Donna Baier Stein, Publisher of Tiferet Journal and Author, Scenes from the Heartland

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH MASS. POETRY here.

TREE OF THE APPLE
Chapbook

Published by Two of Cups Press (out of print)

https://twoofcupspress.wordpress.com/titles/

In this beautiful cycle of lamentations, Kelly DuMar follows her father through the wasteland of Alzheimer’s, tracking his failing mind with the faithfulness of a daughter and a poet. The sounds of the words as I say them, he watches, she writes, evoking the fathomless movements behind his eyes. Elsewhere, she lets him speak for himself as he gathers petals under a trellis: This is how you bend without tipping/This is how you kneel and lift a soft thing/up like a flake of cold that falls from a cloud/when it’s white all over. This is how you lose without breaking, says this book, so filled with that rare poetic sentiment: steadfast family love. At the end, all five siblings gathered around his bed, someone hits on the idea of reading David Copperfield out loud. …we take turns reading/to each other with the masterful passion of a/parent comforting a child to sleep at the end/of a day breaking. Keep this little book nearby, for its passion and its comfort, because nothing comforts like knowing you are accompanied in your sorrows. - Aimée Sands

Copies from the publisher have sold out, but are available in limited quantity through Kelly DuMar

ALL THESE CURES
Chapbook

Winner of Lit House Press' 2014 poetry chapbook contest. 
 

"All These Cures is, like the unsent letter of its opening poem, a quest. Kelly DuMar’s poems are at once ethereal and bold, often taking the shape of both the unfurling string of questions that come from looking back, and the stitching together of those questions themselves, forming an intricate treasure map toward the X of understanding. Each poem gives itself unabashedly to the reflection from which it seems to have been conceived, but instead of settling there, leans forward into the grey space of meaning to face its complexity. The ecstatic moments in DuMar’s poems are electrifying, full of simultaneous urgency and quietude. tanzania (“Do you know the way home? Take me home now so you/will see how we got here from there and by that I mean do/you know how much your life matters to me?”) With All These Cures, like the speaker in “Singing Over Your Bones,” DuMar has sung her words home."


- Laurin Becker Macios, Mass. Poetry Program Director


Purchase here.

Selected Poetry Publications