Description
In the Cathedral of My Undoing, by Kellam Ayres, was selected by Gary Soto for the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.
Is this small town America? A place where the air doesn’t move, love is thin, beer fails nightly to do its trick, and hope rides a cloud to the edge of town, then disappears? These poems are located further east than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but they offer the same story of lives where the dramas are small, their significance large, the outcome of disappointments seemingly permanent. Here is art, here is truth, poems as portraits.
—Gary Soto, final judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize
The human need for connection—what it masks and reveals—is at the heart of Kellam Ayres’ stunning debut collection. Grounded in the weighted, rooted past of rural New England and the rhythms of working life … these poems explore cycles of desire and despair, the need for and inability to change, brokenness and the effort to break free. In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a lyric journey through what would undo us into what sustains.
—Debra Allbery
A work of great candor and lucidity … a gutting and deeply observed collection. Here are snapshots illuminating the truths of human encounter and the naked wrongs of our world; here, too, poems of eerie simplicity and praise, pulsing with a kind of desperate sadness. These are poems of our hidden lives, reminding us of the interior paths we all travel between our betrayals and our acts of courage. A wise, vulnerable, and immensely rewarding book.
—Jenny George
Kellam Ayres is the winner of the 2023 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, selected by Gary Soto for her book In the Cathedral of My Undoing (February 2024). Kellam’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, and elsewhere. She received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Bread Loaf School of English. She works for the Middlebury College Library and lives with her family in Vermont.
