In the Cathedral of My Undoing

"Is this smalltown America? A place where the air doesn't move, love is thin, beer fails nightly to do its trick, and hope rides a cloud to the edge of town, then disappears? These poems are located further east than Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but they offer the same story of lives where the dramas are small, their significance large, the outcome of disappointments seemingly permanent. Here is art, here is truth, poems as portraits."

-Gary Soto, Final Judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize



"A work of great candor and lucidity, In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a gutting and deeply observed collection. Everything Ayres' eye falls on takes on a stark clarity. Her straightforward lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal sensitivity: a fierce capacity for finding the emotional heart of things. I admire the deep attentiveness in these poems - the frontal gazes at the pain and strangeness of our most intimate connections and losses. Here are snapshots illuminating the truths of human encounter and the naked wrongs of our world; here, too, poems of eerie simplicity and praise, pulsing with a kind of desperate sadness. These are poems of our hidden lives, reminding us of the interior paths we all travel between our betrayals and our acts of courage. A wise, vulnerable, and immensely rewarding book."

-Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason



"The human need for connection-what it masks and reveals-is at the heart of Kellam Ayres' stunning debut collection. Grounded in the weighted, rooted past of rural New England and the rhythms of working life, and given expansive resonance in the intimate spaces of the speaker's retrospective present, these poems explore cycles of desire and despair, the need for and inability to change, brokenness and the effort to break free. "I can't possibly protect my heart from this world," our speakerrecognizes in the final section, but the reader is witness throughout to her evolving resilience and self-sufficiency. In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a lyric journey through what would undo us into what sustains."

-Debra Allbery, author of Fimbul-Winter