Timothy Kelly is reading tonight at Open Books in Seattle. I love the title of the new collection, it's perfect for poems from a Physical Therapist. And I hear Tim has some stories to tell of his own extremities of late. Be there!

April 24, 2008 07:30 PM (from Open Books)
TIMOTHY KELLY
Tim Kelly joins us this evening to read from his new collection of poetry, The Extremities ($15.95 Oberlin). He has been a practicing physical therapist for twenty-some years, and his awareness of the body’s expression of injury and health underpins much of his work. Within a poem he spans the distance between the structural information the body can provide -- “the hip’s capsule’s tested / by passively pistoning,” -- and the body’s ability to express itself -- “extended fully, palm out, in / the universal sign for stop.” The descriptions are precise -- “a cool drop spirals down / the upturned horn of my ear, / drowns the drum in a calm, / cupped lake” -- heartfelt and, at times, comic: “What great thing was / my life anyway, but some operatic farce of / loud alarms, late charges, and locustlike teens…?” Tim Kelly is hosting a reception at a nearby restaurant following his reading.

(from Poetry Foundation) "In his third book of poetry, Timothy Kelly details the precise mechanics of human anatomy with exact, yet lyrical language. Images of the body—ligaments, arteries, joints, bones—wind their way through luminous memories, shedding new light on the human experience. Thoughtful and imaginative, expansive yet meticulous, Kelly’s poems are a truly original examination of what it means to occupy the body and inhabit the world."

“The Extremities rescues from the drab columns of textbooks the clinical language of tendons and bones, unlocking an enormous previously unguessed range of metaphor and reference… This is a wonderful book, something truly new.”

—Christopher Howell