postcards from the masthead
by Candice M. Kelsey
Candice M. Kelsey
Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet, educator, and activist who splits her time between Los Angeles and Augusta, GA. She is currently a reader for The Los Angeles Review and serves as a creative writing mentor with PEN America’s Prison and Justice Program. She has received six Pushcart and two Best of the Net nominations while also being named a finalist for Best Microfiction. She is the author of six books: Generation MySpace, Still I am Pushing, A Girl, Woman, Teacher, and Poet, The Poet Dreams of Driving a Ding-A-Ling Ice Cream Truck, Puzzling Things, and Choose Your Own Poem. Originally from Ohio, Candice received her Bachelor’s degree in English from Miami University (Oxford) with an emphasis in epic poetry.
She earned her Master’s degree in literature at Loyola Marymount (L.A.) with an emphasis in critical theory and a focused study of her favorite novel, Melville’s Moby-Dick. She loves all things opera, especially Puccini and the post-Romantic verismo tradition. If she’s not feeding her embarrassing 70s and 80s police procedural obsession with episodes of “Murder, She Wrote” and “Columbo,” she’s most likely cheering, or crying, for the L.A. Dodgers. An unabashed animal lover, she currently has five ragtag cats and a charming corn snake, but Candice’s heart belongs to her three delightful children.
You can reach her by email at candicemkelsey@gmail.com or through her website at https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/
Headshot Photo Credit to Leora Wright
praise for postcards from the masthead
In Kelsey's supple new collection, Postcards from the Masthead, longing is a waterscape haunted by ecological crises and their human etymologies. Employing a range of forms and trenchant lyricism, Kelsey charts a dark but scintillating journey worth taking.
—Tara Stillions Whitehead, Author of They More than Burned (ELJ Editions)
In Postcards from the Masthead, Candice Kelsey blurs the line between world and body. These are poems which explore the iterations of human grief, a shared experience which binds all of us to one another and to the Earth. Candice writes: “My body is a woodhouse. Delicate, easily crushed, what do I know of agency, / intimacy?” When might we bloom and what claims us? In the Anthropocene, “what sinks us?” and who is accountable? Postcards from the Masthead asks hard questions through exquisite images and precise language. This book is urgent, gorgeous, and fearless in its confrontation of society’s betrayals of the Earth and of humankind.
—Joan Kwon Glass, Author of Night Swim (Diode Editions)
Candice Kelsey’s Postcards from the Masthead is breathtaking in its originality and imagery. Each of its lyrical poems can be imagined as a letter mailed to a loved one far away. These poems use the power of metaphor, such as “trauma is a blanket forever unraveling,” to lament the loss of intimacy from relationships and the planet’s vitality in the context of climate change. This collection is also one of hope, as the speaker learns to let imagination close “the distance between separated lovers” as she remembers Old Havana when “the heavens / delivered moonbeams / to lovers / without error.”
—Natalie Marino, Author of Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press)
