Join the Ilsley Public Library for their monthly book club. This month, it’s Kellam Ayres’s debut poetry collection, IN THE CATHEDRAL OF MY UNDOING (Gunpowder Press, 2024). This selection was chosen by Gary Soto as the winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Kellam lives with her husband, daughter, and son in East Middlebury, Vermont.
“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
