Heavy Light by Kelly Morse
We’re so excited to announce that Kelly Morse’s (Poetry ’12) chapbook Heavy Light has been published by Two of Cups Press! Heavy Light was a finalist in the 2015 Two of Cups Chapbook Contest. Click here to buy a copy.
“Kelly Morse’s impressive debut chapbook looks clear-eyed at an essential truth of motherhood: life is wholly new not only for the child but also for the parent. Heavy Light explores this newborn landscape, this newborn life—the baby’s “homespun vernix jumpsuit,” the “daughter’s skull a pale lantern,” the nursing mother learning “what it feels like to be un-/wound for happiness and hunger”—and makes us ask: What happens to the self? In poem after otherworldly poem, Morse answers, showing us the way motherhood scrubs us raw but also shines us; the way it leaves us stinging deliciously in the air, pink and new. The mother in these poems learns to bear the weight of this light, and we are glad to bear it with her.”
– Maggie Smith, author of The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015), winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award
Congratulations, Kelly!
Kelly Morse is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, and translator. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Alimentum, Quarter After Eight and elsewhere, while her translations have appeared in Asymptote. A graduate of Boston University’s MFA program, she has had work nominated for Best of the Net, and she is a Vermont Studio Center fellowship recipient.
