spuytenduyvil

In the poem, The Neighbors (Again), Dave Kelly writes: “These days America belongs only to the loudest and I have grown into an aging whisper.” Not true! The poems of Mandelbrot’s Beach are lightning strikes that ignite the mind. Kelly is a master poet and storyteller; his poems offer intrepid readers a boxer’s tempo prior to a knockout punch. Kelly is the best and necessary kind of poetic voice—incandescent, powerful, genuine, and brilliantly funny. The poems land.

           Richard Martin, author of Goosebumps of Antimatter

 

Dave Kelly's deadpan humor gives me a tumor. Clearly, he's the Babe Ruth of Poetry, still able to hit more than one outta here!

          Joel Dailey, author of My Psychic Dogs My Life

 

Dave Kelly’s Mandelbrot’s Beach is no ordinary beach—it’s home to an array of characters and situations from a Korean War veteran walking into a wall of noise, to children trapped in wire cages, to the drowned passengers lost in Lake Michigan’s storms. It’s a book where the unpredictable is common place and the unexpected is the new normal. Kelly’s wry, sardonic humor, his sharp insights into America, and his keen, unflinching honesty force us to face our common humanity and our failings.

          Gerald McCarthy, author of Trouble Light

 

Dave Kelly’s poems are barbed and caustic and funny, compassionate and tough. They go their own way and leave you startled at where they’ve taken you and how they got you there. They’re rendered in a plain American vernacular with a cool precise edge, refreshingly gruff and unsentimental. Kelly keeps a close eye on the vagaries of daily life, while often being sharply comically at odds with it—daily life with its inanities and provocations, its cruelties and possible hints of grace.

          James Haug, author of Riverain

Dave Kelly has published 15 books and chapbooks of poetry and experimental prose. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. His mother loved him but didn’t like him very much. His father played catch with him in the backyard and taught him to box. Dave has degrees from Michigan State University and from the University of Iowa. He retired in 2009 from the State University of New York at Geneseo, where he was Poet-In-Residence and a professor of English. He now lives on a modest pension with his wife, Sylvia, on his dandelion farm in upstate New York and the family cottage on Lake Michigan.