Claire Kelly
ABOUT CLAIRE
Photo by Rob Ross.
Claire Kelly (she/her) lives and writes on Treaty 6 in Edmonton, AB. She has written two full-length poetry collections: Maunder (Palimpsest Press 2017) centres on the act of walking; One Thing – Then Another (ECW Press 2019) looks at the disjointedness caused by cross-country relocation. In 2016, she curated a chapbook of emerging Edmonton poets for Frog Hollow Press’ City Series. Her latest chapbook, Another Final Girl: Horror Poems, was released in Fall 2020 with Rahila's Ghost Press.
Her work has recently appeared in Qwerty, Room, Vallum, and The Antigonish Review. In 2017, her poem “Mother, What Should We Do Now?” was long listed for the CBC Poetry Prize, and her poem “First the Children Stopped Asking for a Ride” was featured in the League of Canadian Poets’ Poem in Your Pocket Booklet.
Lately her work has focused on horror films and the apocalyptic nothingness that is becoming the certain future of Earthlings (but with jokes!).
Claire Kelly has volunteered for various literary journals, including Qwerty and The Fiddlehead. She has been working in publishing for ten years, currently as the Marketing and Production Coordinator, Copy Editor, and Proofreader at NeWest Press. She is also one of the organizers of the Olive Reading Series.
Claire is available for readings, workshops, panels, and classroom visits.
More information about Claire Kelly is available on her CV.
BOOKS
ECW Press 2019
"Canada is so vast that Europe could almost fit inside it. With vastness comes variance.... Claire Kelly explores this variance like a travel writer interested not in popular activities or land-marks but the locals and their lives."
—Spenser Smith, Prairie Fire
"In the end, this is a book of metamorphosis, but there's no easy portrait of a butterfly. It's an end haunted by the begin-ning: the speaker's roots, geographically and economically and emotionally remain with her even over great physical and temporal distances, a debt not unlike her loans. It's a speaker and a collection that contains the vastness of contrasting weather and ambience and socioeconomics, of the sweeping mass of the country, of the concerns and stagnations of generational conflict, and of the storms ranging above it all."
—Bill Neumire, Vallum
CLICK to read an excerpt.
Palimpsest Press 2017
"These poems, whether long rambles or alleyway shortcuts, are not time wasted. A walk is not always a great revelation of the 'true self'; rather, this collection proves that we need the failed walks, the incomplete, the not-quite-understood, to begin to see the bigger picture around us."
—Tanis Franco, Maisonneuve
"For a poet, this cold and stunted country is potentially limiting. But Claire Kelly ... spit-polishes its imagery and shakes it down for its parsimonious beauty."
—Karen Hofmann, Prairie Fire
CLICK to read an excerpt.
CHAPBOOKS
Horror Poems
Rahila's Ghost Press 2020
"Claire Kelly’s poems are the stuff of daymares."
—Bryce Warnes, The Pamphleteer
CLICK to read an excerpt.
Ur-Moth
(Out of Print)
Frog Hollow Press 2014
NEWER WORK
MEDIA
2021 - 2019
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"What a Pandemic Whiner" - Qwerty 42, Winter 2020
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"Today Your Sad Brain is a Leaky Hot Water Bottle" - Room 43.3, Neurodiverence Issue, Fall 2020
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"Sonnet for an Ass that Won't Quit" - ARC 91, Spring 2020
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"Boyle Street Triptych" - Alberta Views, October 2019 [reprinted from One Thing — Then Another]
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"Moon's Cape" - Vallum 16.2, Fear Issue, Fall 2019
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"Of Parched Potential and Consequence" & "Keep Your Arms and Legs Inside at All Times" -
The Antigonish Review 197 - 198, Fall 2019
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"In this Gig Economy, I Want the Everything of a Manticore" & "Moving Lament" - Prairie Fire 40.4 Winter 2019
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Let's Get Lit: Drunk Poetry Podcast, episode 8
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All Lit Up, Poetry Grrrrowl: One Thing - Then Another
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Qwerty Facebook page: Reading of "What a Pandemic Whiner"
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rob mclennan's blog: 12 or 20 questions with
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Dead Poets Reading Series: Anna Akhmatova
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periodicities: Virtual Reading Series #10
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Open Book: The Proust Questionnaire
EVENTS
(Times in Mountain Time Zone)
29 Apr '21 Attic Owl Reading Series /
4:00 pm Zoom! Link forthcoming on their Facebook page
26 Sept '21 Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry /
5:00 pm Zoom! Link forthcoming on their Facebook page
CONTACT
kellyelclaire (@) gmail.com
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