The Tree is Missing

In one story I stay in that city forever,

in one I board, and in another I am still waiting.

I am daybreak; I am everywhere.

In The Tree Is Missing, Shannon Kuta Kelly explores the poetics of borders. The collection crosses through real cities and non-places, moving between the unnamed and unmapped spaces on the edges of our lives. With remarkable poise and restraint, these itinerant poems experiment with oral history and translation, traversing borderlines of nation, language, and time. They draw on folklore to evoke a world of worlds that feels current and present, but which can only be reached through storytelling. In doing so, Kuta Kelly explores the loss and displacement – the fracture of identity – created by personal and political turmoil. A powerful debut compelled by questions of borders and displacement, Kuta Kelly writes with a restless immediacy from within histories that continue to shape us.