Sky. Pond. Mouth.

The poetic landscape of Sky. Pond. Mouth. is at once spectral and pulsing with life. This is a later career collection for Kevin McLellan, whose previous works include books of poetry as well as book objects. He joins the experimental queer poets before him—Gertrude Stein, CA Conrad, Eileen Myles, Frank O’Hara—in transmuting the quotidian into the numinous, and consecrating the everyday as loci of contemplation, desire, and grief.

These poems blur the boundaries between the animate and inanimate and the personal and universal. When awarding the collection the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize, the judge observed that each “noun is potentially non-I and I. The isolated being is the connected being and vice-versa.” This ontological fluidity and linguistic play echo Stein, even as McLellan forges a new lyric terrain.

He particularly excels at capturing the ephemeral nature of desire and loss. In “The Geranium,” a houseplant becomes a lush symbol, with the speaker confessing “This blooming privy / to my secrets.” The image recalls Conrad’s queer eco-poetics, as it invests the natural world with homoerotic and political meaning. Later, “Clouds” traces the internal landscape of fleeting love against the sky:

………………..I miss hearing
him say we, yet I wasn’t
the one. Yes, he was thinking

about someone else and
I look to the sky.

The sky motif recurs throughout the collection, representing both infinite possibility and individual insignificance: “a scattering of clouds … wanting to hold more.” The sky is juxtaposed with recurring imagery of a winter landscape, and forms part of McLellan’s palette for exploring the fracturing of the self. In the virtuosic long poem “Regarding What Was Lost Before I Knew It Was Taken,” the speaker grapples with the legacy of queer desire and danger, recalling Myles’ poetic excavations of queer trauma amidst the ecstasy of self-discovery:

the time I let a man…..
at a bar take…..
me to a lake…..
house (remember…..
only a surface) (a dark…..
mirror) outside…..
the city limits…..
and leading up…..
to sex I wanted…..
to leave     [.]…..

McLellan also engages with AIDS, echoing the work of poets like Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, and Mark Doty, who chronicled the epidemic’s toll on queer communities. His interest in queer lineage and inheritance extends to his formal experimentation. He writes:

[…..
the moment I…..
no longer…..
needed…..
to fear…..
the given…..
you-are-positive…..
news/taken…..
within…..
]…..

This formal instability finds its most searing expression in the collection’s last section, which McLellan wrote as he underwent cancer surgeries. In stark, incantatory lines, the poet confronts the betrayals of the body and the transformative nature of illness:

I’m distracted by my body.
After surgery and beside
my awareness of nothingness
a mass, a mass that would later
be identified as a blood clot
imposing as a testicle.
My body is distracted by me.

For all its stark probity, Sky. Pond. Mouth. brims with whimsy and irreverence. Like his queer poet forebearers, McLellan deploys radical linguistic experimentation in the service of liberatory politics and poetics. Meanwhile his voice remains incandescent and visceral, and as readers we emerge transfigured, attuned to the ethereal pulsation within our bodies. Poetry becomes a site of reckoning, revelation, and rapture.