Felling Volume 31: (Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry)

About the Book

This collection is a record of one man’s navigation of loss, addiction, and labor. At once a meditation on the allure of a legacy in self-destruction and a giving over to hope, Felling is an exploration in honesty. Rendered in direct language and through clear eyes, this book, as its title indicates, is concerned with tensions of agency, creation, and destruction— upward and downward motion. 

“After the 1940 publication of Native Son, Richard Wright shared some of his stylistic goals in the novel. ‘I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now,’ he writes, ‘like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen. Action follows action, as in a prize fight.’ Kelan Nee’s poetry delivers the immediacy and punch that Wright demanded of literature. Nee has the head for poetry, the heart for poetry, and above all, the guts. This debut collection holds back nothing and leaves me reeling with high hopes for Nee’s future in the craft.”—Gregory Fraser, judge and author of Designed for Flight and Answering the Ruins 

About the Author :
Kelan Nee is a poet and carpenter from Massachusetts. He is a 2023 Adroit Djankian Scholar and has received support from the Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Texas, is pursuing a PhD, and holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He has lived and worked throughout New England.

Review :
“Perhaps being a trained carpenter accounts for the precision and clean elegance that Kelan Nee brings to the craft of writing. But the mixed ache and joy of these poems come from the poet’s particular sensibility, one that’s been variously shaped and broken by the long aftermath of a father’s suicide. Felling is ultimately a book not of triumph over pain but of reconciliation to the fact of it, a model of how art can be a space within which to make a kind of truce with it. Felling is also a book filled with hope. What a debut! Nee’s poems are magnificent, hard-earned, and have the resonance of art that intends to last.” - Carl Phillips, 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner for Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020

“These are poems of transformation, from one life into another, from a father into a son, from a tree into a house. These are poems of searching, for a way other than the one offered. There is a cathedral in the center of these poems, and it serves as a refuge, for Kelan Nee is a poet who has placed himself in the path of the storm, and these words are his salvation. Sometimes this salvation is found in the arms of a lover, sometimes in the memory of childhood, sometimes in the work done to survive. These are the poems of a poet who has already seen what this life can bring, both its ruins and its glory, and has somehow crafted his own cathedral from it all.” - Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.

“'My job is to build a body, dress it up, and invite people in,' writes Kelan Nee in his moving debut collection, Felling. And surely, we are acutely aware of a builder’s capacity and ability in these poems. The journey here is through craftsmanship: the carpenter, the construction worker, the farmhand. There is a visceral tooling at work that spills out into all areas of the collection. It’s in the erotic and in the grief. It is in the central journey through addiction. Every poem here seems at the mercy of fallout. And there is a nearly brutalist sense of the deep structure making up our surroundings – that barebone architecture which still allures and invites. A poignant debut from Kelan Nee, for reading, and re-reading.” - Francine J. Harris, author of Here Is the Sweet Hand, play dead, and allegiance.