Song for Highway 40, Poems by Ellen Chavez Kelley

Ellen Chavez Kelley's Song for Highway 40 is a stark, lovely journey through the landscape of motherhood and memory.

Sample Poems by Ellen Chavez Kelley

"Ellen Chavez Kelley's poems are as lucent as her western landscapes; blood-lit and starkly elegant, they ask 'how is it to love/with no axis, no reason' even as 'hope pulls/like an iron tide on the heart.' These poems are for grown-ups. Without resorting to sentimentality or its opposite, hip cynicism, Kelley assays the nearly overwhelming debts and danger of love—parental love most exquisitely—and the necessary cost of surviving each day's 'violent realignments'."--Dorothy Barresi

"Kelley sings a Song for Highway 40 from New Mexico to California and back again, crossing and re-crossing the beautiful agonies of motherhood and personhood to 'a darker world beyond address.' Reading her, you will want to blend your voice with hers in the desert—one coyote calling to another underneath the moon."--Paul J. Willis

"Kelley's uniquely surging word-music immerses us in a life appreciated, tellingly detailed, deeply understood."--Barry Spacks

"Ellen…travels on the heels of grief toward ultimate grace. ... with language that surprises line by line...beauty and strength for us all in our darkest times."--Perie Longo

Poet and fiction author Ellen Chavez Kelley has been a California Poet in the Schools and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She teaches poetry and tutors writing students in Santa Barbara, CA. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals. Her children’s titles include The Lucky Lizard (Dutton/Penguin), Buckamoo Girls (Abrams) and My Life As A Chicken (Harcourt), a 2010 California Young Readers Medal nominee.

ISBN 978-1936370856, 80 pages

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