The Missing Sea illustrated by local artist Jen Jordan. Courtesy image

COMMUNITY NEWS:

“Dolejsi’s craft and intuitive genius has led her to — dare I say it? — a masterpiece,” National Book Award Finalist William Heyen wrote of a new book of poems by local author Kelly Dolejsi.

The Missing Sea, illustrated by local artist and engineer Jen Jordan, will be released this November. The community is invited to pre-order The Missing Sea at a discounted price until Oct. 3 at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-missing-sea-by-kelly-dolejsi/.

Dolejsi has lived in Los Alamos since 2003, working at the Los Alamos Monitor, Otowi Station Bookstore, Los Alamos Family YMCA, and En Pointe School of Dance, where she currently teaches ballet. She is also active in Los Alamos Little Theatre, performing this summer in Julius Caesar. Dolejsi received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in Boston.

Heyen, author most recently of Nature: Selected & New Poems, Diaspora: Fifteen Collections, endorses the collection on the back cover of The Missing Sea.

“As Kelly Dolejsi fuses her subjects—family, countless shifting selves, her own mind attending itself as it lyrics its way toward momentary closure that will enable her to rest until the next poem—I remained rapt within The Missing Sea,” Heyen wrote.

He added, “She is heir to the wildness here (‘my own heart / gone feral’) that Emerson asked for and Dickinson opened her musical breast & brain to, but at the same time the compression of form in these 14-liners absorbs her concentration as illuminations occur for herself and for us because of her self-imposed boundaries.”

Dolejsi said she is very grateful to Heyen, not only for his “embarrassingly kind blurb,” but for helping her find her place in the world.

“Heyen taught the first poetry class I ever took,” Dolejsi said. “He was patient, never talked down to any of us despite his intimidating publishing credentials, and always made me feel like my thoughts mattered. His class is the first place I really felt like I belonged.”

The Missing Sea begins in a boat without water, “surrounded by nothing,” and throughout the poem series asks, Who am I without my mother?

“The death of my mother was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through — that I’m still going through,” Dolejsi said.

Yet, in the book, presence, not absence, prevails. An abandoned dog finds her valentine. Chickens from an imagist poem spring to life. Antique lamps bring a mother and daughter together.

“The Missing Sea is about reclaiming oneself after a devastating loss,” Dolejsi said. “It’s about coming back, or maybe coming forward for the first time. And Jen Jordan’s lovely, child-like drawings capture the feeling perfectly.”

This is Dolejsi’s second book of poems. Her chapbook, That Second Starling, was published by Desert Willow Press in 2018. She has published poetry and fiction in numerous literary journals as well, including North American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Fifth Wednesday, The Hunger, Broken Ribbon, West Texas Literary Review, Junto, Gravel, Dirty Paws, The Hungry Chimera, Joey and the Black Boots, and The Disconnect.

Kelly Dolejsi

Dolejsi’s poem “Loyalty” was nominated for the Best of the Net, and her contribution to the book, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (edited by William Heyen) was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

The Captain

She’s the only child on a boat bloated 

with grown-ups. A dumb boat: no water 

anywhere, no view at all — she’s surrounded 

by nothing, blank white walls blocking 

a horizon, a sun, maybe whales. She wakes

to a blizzard that has filled the windows 

of their ground-floor apartment with snow, 

thick and lightless. The dream continues, 

or the feeling from it, as she eats oatmeal 

in her ruffly blue nightgown. She knows

there’s a whole world somewhere — a bike, 

a street, a bunch of kids — that’s been lost.

Where did it go? Will it come back? Will she 

ever again be open and vast and free?

An illustration by Jen Jordan in local author Kelly Dolejsi’ book, ‘The Missing Sea’. Courtesy image