The Devotion Field

by Claudia Keelan

“Charged with negative capability, Keelan’s avant-garde collection plays in multiple dimensions….Like a linguistic ethicist—like a mad, social-science hybrid with a knack for transcending—Keelan wonders what worldly results might be achieved by a re-framing, on the level of the pronoun, of our grammatical relationship to the world. Given our sense, given evidence of life on many levels, can we second-and-third-person ourselves? Can we out ourselves toward awareness beyond our singular frames? What kind of relationships are possible when borders are permeable?…Keelan’s de-centered voices proliferate through leaps of metaphor and association, in choral compositions eulogizing the national soul.” — Denver Quarterly “. . .a genuine and not-at-all trite sense of gratitude for the miracles of daily life provides responses, if not answers, to Keelan’s questions, but many post-elections readers will find her inquiries into the larger patterns and parameters of the national soul more pressing.”