There are simply not enough writers out there smoothly using the word "Nor'easter" in their poetry. Fortunately, Kelley White is here to teach us all a thing or two about beautiful language. Her poems are vivid and verdant, showering us with images that could only come from the mind of a master craftsman. She speaks of love, desire, and pain in a way that will imprint itself on the back of your eyes.
Kelley says, "I was born and raised in New Hampshire, have degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School, and have been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for the past twenty years. I write to survive, returning to poetry when I found myself an unwontedly single mother of three after a very difficult divorce a few years ago. I started sending work two years ago with very modest goals (I hoped to have a half dozenpoems published by my fiftieth birthday in 2004) but have had somewhat surprising success, with 800 poems accepted or published by 200 journals including American Writing, The Café Review, Chiron Review, Feminist Studies, The Larcom Review, Minnesota Review, Nimrod, Rattle, and Whiskey Island Magazine. A book of my "medical" poems, The Patient Presents, was published last spring by The People's Press in Baltimore and a chapbook of very different material, "I am going to walk toward the sanctuary," was published this fall Nepenthe Books/Via Dolorosa Press. I received a Pushcart nomination for an experimental piece (from Gravity Presses) in 2000, my first year of submission. This spring I have received a contract to publish a second chapbook, "Blues: Songs for Desdemona," with Via Dolorosa Press and to publish "At the Monkey-Feast Table" with ZeBook Company, a new online poetry publisher. My children and I are shocked by this success." You can write to Kelley at kelleywhitemd@yahoo.com.
Kelley's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2003:
Schedule
Mina
When I sleep
2002:
Reincarnation
Contrition
Michael, three
I hope it will be quiet tonight