Banjo's Inside Coyote

The old gods only ask for forgiveness when watching from too far a distance. They guess and risk and let their furred ankles meet a finger’s shaky tip. In our looking up and inward, we, too, construct a primeval forest populated by winding rows of tiger lilies imagined in a lover’s nautical ear where shipwrecks line beaches made of nickel and iron. Here, hunger comprises both soil and canopy, and little escapes the hourglass’s rough rim. The poems in this collection are meant for such appetites. Images do not just leap from line to line, they duck and burrow between pages, careful to reveal their earnestness only to those with mouths open wide. Banjo’s Inside Coyote is a book of questions—those meant to remind us to stay longer in the mossy Inn and listen close to stories we should not soon forget. In every port, one barstool will host a long wagging tail. If we follow its swing to spine to throat to snout, we will notice teeth spread broad in a smile, in a welcome and warning. Answers are risky. They are propelled by lust and hope for beauty, by something like a winged raft too quick down a trickster’s river. The poems in Kelli Allen’s third full length collection ask us to curl our tongues past the lips we lick for salt, the ones we part when asking for longer here, in this place of pirate flags and slick bellies still hot under busy palms. These are poems for what we offer inside-out, for whomever might be waiting on the shore.