Popular Music

by Kelly Schirmann
Softcover / 160 p. / Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-939568-15-1

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Kelly Schirmann is a poet, musician, ceramicist, and visual artist from Northern California. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.


What an elegant sacrifice it is to be in love" with a book like Popular Music, one that drags you into and out of a world you forgot before you were born and then asks you to wake up and grow yourself alive. I don't know how to describe Kelly Schirmann's poems in a way that feels exactly right, to move inside the "empathy fire" or talk back to the many versions of myself that this book shines its light on. How do I talk back when I have been so lovingly split apart? Hers is a generous mind with an explicitly wild and playful vision, agitated by the expanse of her own belief and willfully undone by the heft of her love—for you, for every other, for the planets not invented yet.

—Emily Kendal Frey, author of Sorrow Arrow

There’s solace in these poems, and redemption, in waking up along the shore dripping wet as a new animal, scrambled by the ominous birthing light her poems insist and reflect. But they don’t augur, and aren’t hope, but stretch and wail like an immense sky, momentarily, obscuring the void from us. She does this by lifting flowers out of her skull, which is to say beauty from death, or art from meaninglessness.”

—Jon-Michael Frank, author of Here It Is My Beautiful Fucking Heart (El Aleph Press), Diana Ross & The Supremes (Black Cake Records), and How's Everything Going? Not Good (forthcoming from Ohio Edit / Cuneiform Press).