Cleaving the Clouds

The poems in Margaret Kean's Cleaving the Clouds are simply beautiful. The work here is grief work, but I can't help imagining beauty on top of death, in layers, like Mark Doty's quote, There are buried cities/one beneath the other. These are lyrically resonate poems that refuse to filter out the natural beauty of the world in the midst of grief-there are white cockatoos, carillon bells, jack rabbits, and barren trees. As if to say, grief with its arms crossed, stubbornly remains in this world, entangled with the beauty within the world.

-Victoria Chang, author of OBIT

In Cleaving the Clouds, Margaret Kean deftly explores the many facets of a 'grief [that] keeps interrupting.' Her poems 'speak in gentle voices, ' strong yet quiet, reverent yet contemplative. They weave the spiritual and the mundane into images rich with sensory observations as the speaker navigates the loss of her loved ones. Kean delves into the deepest recesses of raw human emotions, inviting us to reflect on our own mortality, to sit with 'the impossibility of our yearning.' From the hummingbird that thumps against glass, to the warmth of a candle flame, and the breaths we all share, these poems ask us to pause and process, to partake in the sacred act of honoring the lives of those we've loved and lost.

-Leonora Simonovis, author of Study of the Raft

Margaret Kean's inaugural collection, Cleaving the Clouds, stuns with its truths about grief and death. Kean's poems explore grief as a mental wilderness inhabited by a lone coyote's primordial howl at dawn. Harnessing the power of that inhuman howl gives Kean the strength to witness and record both of her parents' illnesses and deaths. She shares raw but tender final interactions with each parent-her mother's last thirst for air, her father, bereft of speech. Like lightning splitting dark clouds, Kean's talent emerges like a magician [who] weaves flames with her fingers. Cleaving the Clouds is an open-eyed, brave tribute to art as redemption in the face of loss.

-Julia Caroline Knowlton, author of Life of the Mind