Praise for "Cleaving the Clouds"
"The poems in Margaret Kean's Cleaving the Clouds are simply beautiful. The work here is grief work, but I can't help imagining beauty on top of death, in layers, like Mark Doty's quote, There are buried cities/one beneath the other. These are lyrically resonate poems that refuse to filter out the natural beauty of the world in the midst of grief -- there are white cockatoos, carillon bells, jack rabbits, and barren trees. As if to say, grief with its arms crossed, stubbornly remains in this world, entangled with the beauty within the world."
-
Victoria Chang, author of OBIT
"In Cleaving the Clouds, Margaret Kean deftly explores the many facets of a grief [that] keeps interrupting. Her poems speak in gentle voices, strong yet quiet, reverent yet contemplative. They weave the spiritual and the mundane into images rich with sensory observations as the speaker navigates the loss of her loved ones. Kean delves into the deepest recesses of raw human emotions, inviting us to reflect on our own mortality, to sit with the impossibility of our yearning. From the hummingbird that thumps against glass, to the warmth of a candle flame, and the breaths we all share, these poems ask us to pause and process, to partake in the sacred act of honoring the lives of those we've loved and lost."
-
Leonora Simonovis, author of Study of the Raft
"Margaret Kean's inaugural collection, Cleaving the Clouds, stuns with its truths about grief and death. Kean's poems explore grief as a mental wilderness inhabited by a lone coyote's primordial howl at dawn. Harnessing the power of that inhuman howl gives Kean the strength to witness and record both of her parents' illnesses and deaths. She shares raw but tender final interactions with each parent -- her mother's last thirst for air, her father, bereft of speech. Like lighting splitting dark clouds, Kean's talent emerges like a magician [who] weaves flames with her fingers. Cleaving the Clouds is an open-eyed, brave tribute to art as redemption in the face of loss."
-
Julia Caroline Knowlton, author of Life of the Mind
***
To order a copy from Kelsay Books:
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/cleaving-the-clouds
To order a copy from Bookshop.org:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/cleaving-the-clouds-margaret-anne-kean/43a7a848eb59ec24?ean=9781639804597&next=t
To schedule a reading:
email margaretkean58@gmail.com
Reviews of Cleaving the Clouds
Poetry Rev 60 - Margaret Anne Kean - Cleaving the Clouds - by Poet Katie Manning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCbct_jgdlc
"In the Kindness of Their Quiet" - a review by Poet Leonora Simonovis. EcoTheo Review
Book review by Poet Yamini Pathak. San Antonio Review.
POEMS
Abandoned School Yard in Mendocino
​
Over cracked asphalt, tetherball chains hang empty,
clang against poles, echo
like bells against desolate winter skies,
this broken earth.
​
There are no sounds of children.
Just wild bird calls and the wind
swirling untethered across the playground.
The kind of freedom we crave.
​​
- Whale Road Review, Winter 2024
The Garden – a poem by Margaret Anne Kean - Amethyst Magazine
​
Reciprocity – a poem by Margaret Anne Kean - Amethyst Magazine
​
My Thirst - (pg 77) - Soul Poetry Prose & Art Magazine
​
DCIS Grade 3 :: Wanted: Sewing Ability - Eunoia Review
​
DCIS Grade 3 :: Name the Sadness - Eunoia Review​
​
DCIS Grade 3 :: To Feel My Body Again - Quartet Journal
​
​Twenty Faces - San Antonio Review
​
Sabbath Preparation - San Antonio Review
​
My Fingers Slide Across the Line - Rogue Agent Journal
​
Shifting Ground - Rogue Agent Journal
​
At the Retirement Community I Ask My Father To Whistle
​
​---and Broadway turns break out,
flow into operatic arias.
​
Inhaling,
his cheeks shape the air into carillon bells
​
that ring clear and strong
as they have since I was a child.
​
I loop my arm through his. As we walk,
he leans, and whistles: windows fly open in welcome,
​
the Whistler's notes soar through screen doors,
wriggle into sidewalk cracks,
​
flow underneath shrubs, join
with bubbles from koi swimming
​
in the pond under the wooden bridge
and in the kitchen are kneaded
​
into bread dough
that waits to rise.
​​
​
(From Cleaving the Clouds, ​Kelsay Books, 2023)
​
​
Hospice
​
If I place my feet on the floor
I will walk into this day.
​
If I open my hands
I will see her hands:
​
gravity sucking water out of skin
collapsing cancer-riddled bones.
​
I wish I were night leaning down
to touch her eyes closed:
​
in her bedroom I smell loneliness
on father's frayed wool bathrobe:
​
the one she's worn since his fall.
​
(From Cleaving the Clouds, Kelsay Books, 2023)
The Bottle-Fed Poets (Merry Dennehy, Margaret Kean, Yamini Pathak, Leonora Simonovis) - "Poem Soup & Other Nourishments - Four Poets Collaborate" (includes "A Letter to Altadena Ashes") - About Place Journal​
​
Your Normal, My Normal - Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 111 as part of AWP 2025 "Off Site. On Purpose." Reading​​
E S S A Y E T T E S
Thoughts About Writing and Reading Poetry
​
In her book, A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver wrote: "...a mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry....poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed."
​
In a 2008 interview in The Bomb Magazine, Lauren LeBlanc asked poet Ada Limon this question: "Is poetry an act of naming for you?" She answered: "I love this question, because I am, in fact, obsessed with naming. The idea of putting words to the ultimately unsayable is fundamentally the poet's insurmountable task."
​
She goes on to say why she loves poetry: "I love poetry for numerous reasons, but one very essential reason is that poetry is the only creative writing art form that builds breath into it. It makes you breathe. It not only allows for silence, it demands it."
​
Both Oliver and Limon put into words thoughts that have been inarticulate in my mind for many years. I am in awe of poets who can use language to capture what happens in our brains and in our hearts when we notice egrets walking slowly along the beach after low tide, patiently lifting their long legs as they search for sustenance. I read Oliver's poem "The Ponds" and know my imperfections to be acknowledged and accepted. Jane Kenyon's "Walking Alone in Late Winter" captures the complexity of relationships. As a former choral singer, I am stunned, and find myself holding my breath, while reading W.S. Merwin's "Weinrich's Hand." And as I grow older, I am moved deeply by Merwin's "Dew Light."
Poets express the deep longings and fears we all experience.They use poetic forms and the musicality of words to grieve senseless violence, to celebrate the life force within jazz rhythms and to honor a life fading before our eyes.
​
I believe in mystery and wonder, in the interconnectedness among all living creatures and the reality of another dimension we cannot see. I am drawn to the beauty of creation – to the drops of waters hanging like pearls on a barren tree in winter, to the iridescent pink of a hummingbird head and the deep blackness of the crow’s feathers.
I believe that the human body, mind and spirit are deeply entwined. Although I am not a scientist, I am fascinated by recent discoveries in neuroscience that show how the brain is re-wired through meditation, by what we read and what we spend time thinking about. (As has been stated, “Our mind grows by what we feed it.”) To me, poetry is a way to write about all of that and to celebrate the extraordinary mystery of the ordinary, everyday lives that we are given.
​
​
A Favorite Poem
The World I Live In
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what's wrong with Maybe?
​
You wouldn't believe what once or
twice I have seen. I'll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
every, possibly, see one.
​
- Mary Oliver, Felicity
(c) 2015 Penguin Press
Breathing and Being
She said it was an act of rebellion. Men and women choosing to lie perfectly still, consciously breathing, simply being, not doing. A dangerous rebellion.
And it makes me wonder what would happen if across the globe people chose to simply be and not always do? If we brought our hearts to our work and not just our minds? What if we chose to focus on kindness, breath and being present now, in this only day we have been given? To not be filled with thoughts that anticipate tomorrow but focus only on this moment we are in. What tectonic shift could happen?
What if we refused to get wrapped up in senseless arguments, petty concerns and simply led with breath, kindness and sensitivity. If we prayed for ourselves and for others around us that our hearts would be opened and softened to recognize beauty in nature and in other people around us? What revolution would that bring?
Peace certainly can’t be achieved through war. It won’t necessarily be achieved solely through loud protests. Perhaps it can be achieved through conscious silence and attention? By groups standing purposely still. Kneeling in silence. Walking quietly, deliberately, intentionally, slowly, one foot in front of another. Placing ourselves, our bodies, our breath in a reverential, sacrificial way for another.
Imagine if masses of people were to stop, to stand still, to breathe in and to exhale, together, on this journey.
The ocean might breathe again. The land might breathe again. The hawks, the crows, the hummingbirds, the pigeons, the sky and the clouds, could all breathe a long exhale sigh of release and relief. What a healing could come upon the land. What a different way we could be with each other. We might even see God in the faces of all our brothers and sisters.
​
​
B O O K R E V I E W S
​​​
A Shiver In The Leaves
by
Luther Hughes (BOA Editions, 2022)
​
“Who Owns This Body, Really?”
Nov 21
​
“If I am successful, my people will make eye contact with you, and our dialogue will begin,” wrote the late artist Robert Ernst Max, whose painting “Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave” adorns the cover of Luther Hughes’ powerful debut book of poetry, A Shiver in the Leaves. Hughes’ poems make eye contact. By successfully weaving his own experiences and point of view in response to a wide range of visual art, song lyrics, other poems and current news, he brings the reader not only into relationship with the speaker, but also into societal conversations about race, sexuality and the crushing weight of violence...
​
For the full review, use this link:
EcoTheo Review - A Shiver in the Leaves
​
​
​SEEING THE BODY
by
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2020)
Reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean
​
“…her body was the only home/I cared about.”
​
Poet Marilyn Nelson has said “when you go to listen to a poet read, you leave having learned not only about the poet’s reality but also about the reality you are living.” She calls this “communal pondering.” Through Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ exquisite fifth book, Seeing the Body, we are invited into communal pondering about the physicality of grief, silence and absence, as the poet grapples with her mother’s death, its effect on the poet’s body and psyche, and the necessity of living beyond such a monumental loss.......
​
For the full review, use this link:
by
Brandon Rushton (Tupelo Press, 2022)
reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean
​
​Brandon Rushton’s debut poetry book, The Air in the Air Behind It, begins with an epigraph from Anne Carson’s The Sea Around Us. “And wherever two currents meet, especially if they differ sharply in temperature or salinity, there are zones of great turbulence and unrest.” This seems to foreshadow the disorder and unease that the collection explores in beautifully expressive and musical language.​...
​
For the full review, use this link:​
The Loneliest Whale in the World
by
Tom Hunley (Terrapin Books, 2024)
reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean
In an essay titled, “The Poetry Collection is a Place for Disparities, Or Let It Bleed,” Jennifer Givhan writes: “A poetry collection is a place for disparities and oppositions and paradoxes to coexist and coalesce and stretch us to find new ways of existing within the flux….I’ve found the most freedom in my work when I’ve allowed everything to bleed, as I have bled.”
​
In Tom Hunley’s latest poetry collection, The Loneliest Whale in the World, the author generously opens his life to his readers, engaging in a dialogue with himself and with us about how to navigate and be fully present for all the twists and turns of life. Within these poems, we are invited to ponder how we process hard truths of aging, autism, abuse, of death by suicide, or those small internal deaths that come from being misunderstood or excluded...
To read the full review, use this link:
Compulsive Reader - The Loneliest Whale in the World
​
Let This Be Understanding
Nov 1
A Review of Nadia Colburn’s Book, I Say The Sky (The University Press of Kentucky, 2024)
​
In his book Story of a Poem, Matthew Zapruder writes, “A poem is not mere reportage. It is an enactment of a relationship between consciousness and the world” (136). In her most recent poetry collection, I Say The Sky, Nadia Colburn quietly reveals her honest and grace-filled relationship with the world. Through her contemplative and evocative poems, she invites the reader to join her in exploring the wounds and joys of being fully human.  
​
To read the full review, use this link:
Eco-Theo Review - Let This Be Understanding
​
A B O U T
A B O U T T H E P O E T
Photograph by Chris Flynn
Margaret Anne Kean was born in Los Angeles and raised in Southern California. She received her BA in British/American Literature from Scripps College, and after raising her family, received her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Antioch University/Los Angeles.
Margaret is a poetry reader of Inch micro-chapbooks with Bull City Press. A 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee and a nominee for the Best of Net Anthology 2026, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including Amethyst Review, About Place Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rogue Agent Journal, EcoTheo Review, Soul Poetry, Prose and Art Magazine, and Whale Road Review.
Her reviews have been published in Drizzle Review, Tupelo Quarterly, EcoTheo Review and The Compulsive Reader. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Winter Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference and Idyllwild Writer's Week.
She is collaborating with a Portland, Oregon composer to set a tanka series. The first of the five was performed in October 2024.
​
Her debut chapbook collection, Cleaving the Clouds, is available from Kelsay Books, Bookshop.org and Amazon.
Margaret lives in Pasadena, California and Chicago, Illinois with her husband, and enjoys time with her two daughters whose stories are theirs to share.
​
To schedule a reading, please contact Margaret at margaretkean58@gmail.com.
CONTACT
For further information please contact me at MargaretKean58@gmail.com