Amytis Leaves Her Garden

Amytis Leaves Her Garden is a lovely, lyrical collection. I particularly admire the musicality of your indvidual lines. You write with an admirable density. comments from Dana GioiaKaren Kelsay's distinct poetic voice descends not from the modernists, but from the 19th-century "poetess" tradition that is being rediscovered by feminist scholars. Kelsay is the editor of Victorian Violet Press poetry journal, and like flowers pressed within the pages of a Victorian album, her poems translate memorable experiences into compressed visual images, and vice versa. Lush passages of description and hard-earned lines of wisdom lodge in the reader's mind.

Julie Kane, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2012

Studying this collection, "Amytis Leaves Her Garden," I am captivated most by author Karen Kelsay's confidence in her audience. Hers is a verse to respect the reader at every turn - beauty without blind, trap, or land-mine, as secure in itself as it is in its reader. "I read my thoughts on some far distant night..." she writes in the poem 'Quiet Flame' - an apt epithet for the collection - "...green willow trees with soft Parisian light." And, seated in her audience, I feel as though not only is that light my own possession, but -"far and distant" - the thought, as well.

Jennifer Reeser