THUGWISE CAT

Imagine Not Drowning
by Kelli Allen
C&R Press
Reviewed by Jeff Santosuosso
From its first piece to its last, Kelli Allen’s second and newest full-length collection,
Imagine Not Drowning, takes flight through love and sex, death and life, through things
neatly paired via juxtapositions that create wide-open spaces. She collects images
simultaneously and parses linearity from space and dispersion.
The beauty of the work is that there’s ample room for free association, inference, spiritual
roaming. Allen embraces, rather than resists the whirl. These are rich, dense, complex
poems filled with shades of words, connotations, innuendoes which venture quite far to
the edges of meaning. Imagine Not Drowning is not for the casual reader or the casual
read.
Allen presents a mystical excerpt from Machado describing the incongruity yet final
redemption of man’s unpreparedness for the awesome power of the sea. Reader
precaution: You have tools, finally insufficient, inappropriate, or useless to quell your
sense of awe in the natural world. Yet like the quotation, the poems, motifs, and
undercurrents exalt the striving, extol the humanity. It’s worth the physical and spiritual
effort, nearly self-redemptive, like the verses and observations.
These are poems of implication, sometimes of induction. We’re liberated to wander along,
taking things as they come, sometimes with attribution, correlation, even cause and effect.
But alongside familiar and linear narrative, Allen weaves the perceptual fabric with the
cryptic, the near-non sequitur. The effect is of duality and relationships, tangible and
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