by Isaac Randel
October 7, 2025
The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly; Graywolf Press; 72 pages; $17
Something fundamentally fresh is happening in The Natural Order of Things, the latest poetry volume from Donika Kelly. Writing in – and against – a catalogue haunted by the aftershocks of trauma, this collection offers a halting, cautious, and ultimately mature vision of personal healing – a provisional hope for true contentment amid a collage of losses.
In The Natural Order of Things, Kelly approaches her familiar mix of poetic concerns, interspersing poems on childhood with poems that draw from the natural world and others on more mature erotic connections. Bestiary, Kelly’s breakout volume (and winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize), established the poet as a first-rate chronicler of abuse and survival. The eclectic ideas of that first collection were grounded by an extended suite, “How to be alone,” which offered a meditation on an experience of nauseating betrayal. This throughline continued with 2021’s The Renunciations, where the poet’s negotiations took on a more literal form, with the speaker wrestling with a fictional alternate self. The central trauma of these earlier collections occupies its share of The Natural Order of Things, but its presence is atmospheric rather than tangible, caught through subtle dips and darkenings of imagery rather than overtly stated.
The pain that drives the collection’s journey toward emotional recovery fans across a wider array of situations and generations: the multi-layered legacy of a family, for one, and the often-agonizing quest for stable human connection for another. Kelly’s turn toward the animal world as a proxy for categories of human feeling recalls the central conceit of Bestiary, but the images here are more controlled thematically. These are not, strictly speaking, “nature poems.” Nearly all the animals that populate the collection, from seagulls to octopuses to flat-worms, are stand-ins for a kind of explicitly human mobility and freedom-seeking which complement the larger direction of the collection. Elsewhere, like in the erotically charged “Triptych,” animal-centered imagery offers Kelly the appropriate vehicle for exploring the exhaustions, thrills, and disappointments of human sexuality. The titular “natural order of things,” then, is less a nod toward ecological truths than an extended metaphor on the human social order.
Even so, The Natural Order of Things is haunted by natural landscapes, especially those of the Deep South – a place, the poet tells us, “I can never return.” Again and again, “neutral” images of waterways and marshes elide into South-coded descriptions of Arkansas and the broader Mississippi Delta. This allows an easy transition into what is easily the most affecting part of the book: the early poems centered on the poet’s complicated engagement with extended family from Arkansas and beyond. Here, Kelly reveals a two-fold kind of intimacy, writing with affection (and, occasionally, devastating suspicion) about cousins, grandparents, and uncles, while also expressing a deep unease about her own distance from them.
“Sixteen Center,” a tangent-rich poem about a parcel of ancestral family land in Arkansas, is one of the most controlled and effective examples of this tension. The discursion closes with a tender reproduction of a phone call with the speaker’s grandfather:
He offers some measure of a past we do not share,
and it’s easier to let be what is lost, to put down
what I never carried. And soon enough, Well,
let me let you go. Soon enough, I love you,
this you I know best in story, love best in flesh.
The speaker’s hunger for an authentic record of the family story goes unsatisfied. Too much time has gone by, too much has been forgotten, too many distressing losses have eaten up the intervening years. But more than that, the speaker finds herself unable – even unwilling – to push any harder on the frail family elders for answers.
There’s a touching, if ultimately tragic, sense of resignation to distance that crops up throughout the collection. When the speaker wanders, later, through a museum exhibition, she doubts whether its pieces (and, by extension, any art) could ever be communicated to her closest kin: “Who among my siblings cares for the hall, / for the bones? Who among my parents’ / siblings would see the metaphor of the hand” – it’s a question, ultimately, about distance itself, especially between an artist and those human subjects to whom her work is, ostensibly, devoted. It's an enormously affecting, and powerfully understated, mixture of sentiments: family is there to be loved, the poems suggest, even if they can never be understood fully.
Kelly’s opening salvo of poems wrestling with family and ancestral memory eventually gives way to a sporadic engagement with romantic and erotic love (amid other concerns). Here, the collection is both at its most assured, and at its diciest. The more the poems abandon themselves to the “animal” side of love, the more optimistic their speakers become about combating the world-weariness spawned by past traumas and tragedies. Yet these same moments of heightened intimacy also produce some of the collection’s dodgiest transitions and one-off images, often leaning too much on the conceit of “cataloguing” body parts. The strongest poems in this section, and the ones with the most to say toward staving off despair, retain a measure of irony evident in the earlier poems. “For now, / grab the hand that pulls you up,” Kelly writes at the collection’s midpoint – “Is the hand your own? So be it. Is the hand / another’s? So be it.”
This is one of many small triumphs which The Natural Order of Things celebrates: the choice to accept life and its responsibilities, to proceed, at all costs, with a sense of true open-heartedness. Erotic and filial loves, an intoxication with ecological beauty, and especially a specific species of hard-won, mature self-love, drive this collection away from bleakness and toward something like a permanent basis of hope.
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“Wild Soft Hope": The Beauty of Endurance in Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things
POETRY REVIEW
Image by JP Valery from Unsplash
Isaac Randel earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School. He is an adjunct instructor of English at Mercy University and teaches English at Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle, New York. He currently serves as an Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review.
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