books of poetry.
cover art by Charles Gurche
book and jacket design:
Christine Lysnewycz Holbert
Look for The Saint of Everything at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis
The Saint of Everything
Lynx House Press, 2023
These are poems of deep sentiment, and certain collisions of memory and imagination; poems that respect melancholy; and poems that deepen our understanding of betrayal and tenderness, love, loss and even violence. This book is about decades of thinking, feeling, considering what living might really mean and what a person does or doesn’t do to protect one’s spirit, one’s soul.
Deborah Keenan’s poems comfort with profound power. Is it her plain-spoken lyric that works on us like the prose of Marilynne Robinson? Is it the afterglow of her polished brilliance, line by line, that lingers with us for years? The Saint of Everything does everything to spread joy with circumspectness and balances the world and all its ironies deftly, making negative capability rather comfy. For decades her words have provided us with solace — I will always hold her poems close.
— Spencer Reece, author of The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir
I found Deborah Keenan’s poems late, but I found them, and now they’re essential to me. The Saint of Everything, set in an age of violence, fashions fear into poems of eerie beauty that could be dreams, or paintings. What they are is truth delivered in a voice both conversational and enchanted, unguarded and afraid. You may think you know where Deborah Keenan’s poems will lead, but you don’t. They are full of surprise. This is a gorgeous, mysterious, ferocious book.
— Kathleen Flennicken, author of Plume and Post Romantic
My God, these are beautiful poems. I feel as if a great soul is speaking in them, after long thought and meditation and inward dialog.
— Charles Baxter, author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories
Jacket design by
Christian Funfhausen
Willow Room, Green Door
Milkweed Editions, 2007
“A great soul is speaking in these poems, after long thought and meditation and inward dialogue.”
– Charles Baxter
Written over the course of three decades, this extraordinary collection of new and selected poems presents a body of work from Deborah Keenan that is expressive variously of love and rage, vulnerability and authority, distraction and focus, and perhaps above all, a sharply empathetic sense of observation. Deborah Keenan’s work balances holding on to what is dear with letting go of what she cannot change.
Recipient of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Book design/illustrations
by Sylvia Ruud
Kingdoms
Laurel Poetry Collective, 2006
Kingdoms is Deborah Keenan’s seventh collection of poetry. This book picks up some of the strands and themes present in her collection Good Heart (Milkweed Editions, 2003), though she also heads off in some new directions. The opening suite of poems, “The Bridge Poems,” are inspired by John Ashbery’s beautiful poem that is engraved into the Armijani bridge that crosses from The Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden to Loring Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There are poems of memory and transformation, family portraits, and a set of poems contemplating the fate of certain animals and birds in our world. Some of the poems in Kingdoms appear in Willow Room, Green Door. Keenan has said that many of the poems in Kingdoms would not exist if she hadn’t been a member of the Laurel Poetry Collective, where she was continually inspired to create new work by her colleagues in that group.
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Cover sculpture
by Jennifer S. Holland
Good Heart
Milkweed Editions, 2003
“Litany-like, the poems use fragments, ambiguous words, unusual punctuation, unexpected linebreaks, unexpected breaks within lines, and several voices. The result is a surreal quality reminiscent of the paintings of Marc Chagall. The angle of vision changes, with the poet dancing on rooftops, or flying, while Keenan notices everything–from her mother’s “green taffeta dress/Drifts, no plummets, no, falls”; to the baby “turned to an open window/Full of golden wind.”… Winner of the American Book Award, Keenan wrote these poems the year her mother died and her first grandchild was born. Perhaps this explains the book’s preoccupation with two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, with poet and poetry as the connectors between them.”
— Diane Sharper, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Book cover and art
by Leslie Ross
Happiness
Coffee House Press, 1995
“Keenan posits maternal love as an act of rebellion against universal rancor, though most of her poems are steeped in unabashed, passionate doubt. These are, quite simply, poems about love (while not exactly love poems) and the many forms it takes. They are finally NOT about happiness. Best of all, they are smart enough to know the difference.”
— Carol Muske Dukes, The Nation
Cover photograph
and photographs
by Timothy Francisco
The Only Window That Counts
New Rivers Press, 1985
“Deborah Keenan’s The Only Window That Counts is a book of our staying, our abiding, our settling and making do. Far from being domesticated and housebroken songs of caged birds, Keenan’s voices in these poems are the songs of an imagination residing(taking again a considered stand)within a dramatic location… The poems in The Only Window That Counts are always highly associational and create that vortex, that pattern of integrity, where anything might and often does happen.”
— Liam Rector, Poetry Society of America
“It is difficult to write objective, aloof criticism about Deborah Keenan’s poetry. Her poems are meant to be read the way one views a painting: an absorption of color and image that evokes emotions unique to the reader/observer. “
— Meg Spilleth, University of Minnesota Daily
Wood-block prints and
Letter Press printing
by Gaylord Schanilec
One Angel Then
Midnight Paper Sales Press, 1981
This book was designed and hand printed by Gaylord Schanilec in an edition of 280, of which 60 were numbered and signed by the author and artist. This limited edition sold out quickly, though sometimes, over the years, people have found the book and repurchased it.
Collectible available on Amazon
Please visit Gaylord’s beautiful website to see his extraordinary work, which receives international attention.
Drawings by
Gaylord Schanilec
Household Wounds
This collection was the very first in the series Minnesota Voices.
“Household Wounds, by Deborah Keenan, contains a large number of poems of extraordinary power. These poems rely surprisingly little upon the devices of metaphor. Rather, their tone is precise: the force stemming from the taut directness of the voice. What the voice speaks of are daily pains, difficult love, the bonds of children and memory, survival. There are no pastorals, no sentimental pieces…Without question Household Wounds is a remarkable book, particularly as a first collection of the poet’s work…Midnight Paper Sales has recently published a beautiful chapbook entitled One Angel Then which contains five additional poems by Keenan…In both Household Wounds and One Angel Then, the artwork by Gaylord Schanilec is exceptional.”
— Lawrence Sutin, Minnesota Monthly
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