“In this stunning collection, Candice Kelsey skillfully maneuvers the reader through different levels of escape, encompassing both the pangs and the beauty of living. Seemingly light-hearted pieces like ‘Ode to sleeping in my mascara’ and ‘Epiphany, or checking her face in the rearview mirror at a red light’ suggest a wider social critique that initially is unexpected, but delightfully surprises.

Grief and loss are woven throughout this collection. Seemingly innocuous sentences like “After all, who would sweep their kitchen floor?” camouflage a deeper, larger and poignant loss, highlighting how we are faced with daily, mundane losses alongside more significant, direct and life-altering ones. Kelsey reminds the reader timeously in this work that some level of escapism (and comfort therein) is required to walk hand-in-hand with grief, both monumental and minute. A delightful and relevant work!”

“ Condos rising, but requiring a century-old house to be razed. A celebrity’s fathomless entitlement, but flooding a humble salon in LA. Commemorations, but dementia. Love, but divorce. Births, but cemeteries. Candice Kelsey’s The Poet Dreams of Driving a Ding-a-Ling Ice Cream Truck & Other Means of Escape gives us a brash, unflinching — and inescapably honest — portrait of life’s countless paradoxes. Herein, Kelsey deftly explores the precarious architecture of our world, constantly in flux, often against our will and wishes: the constructs that surround us, the constructs that replace other constructs, even the constructs that we find ourselves to be. “My clothes are oblivious. They don’t realize they have become but garish costumes I have forever shed. Costumes for a different woman,” Kelsey writes, diving beneath the flimsy surfaces of such labels as daughter, wife, mother, employee, and writer to identify, resist — and maybe even escape — the ways these identities fail others and ourselves. “[F]inally / She meets herself — chaotic woman, survivor-warrior complete,” Kelsey later states, ultimately revealing to us throughout this remarkable collection what, within the brightest realms of imagination and through the boldest acts of creation, we might still possibly find beneath all the guises. ”

“Candice Kelsey writes beautifully and lyrically in this wide-ranging collection about our attempts to escape and failures to do so. These are brave, funny and fearless poems, which consider the issues of family, grief, feminism, violence, poetry alongside many others with the poet’s signature brand of brilliant and wry observation. Kelsey is the rare intellectual who manages to write poems that are accessible to everyone. Her particular talent is in making the everyday poetic, as in masterpieces such as ‘Cigarette Butt Manifesto’ where a neighbor chucks her cigarette butts over her gate and the narrative voice inhales poems. This is an important collection from an important poet, deserving of a wide readership.”

“Kelsey’s poetry exposes the DNA of personal history, what is inherited and maybe ineluctable, while unfolding the complexities of grief and loss through a lens that is sometimes escapist and, other times, unflinching. Her poems offer up the possibility of deliverance—or perhaps just the courage to continue the journey. The Poet Dreams reminds us that reading can also be witnessing and an opportunity to share our commonality and expand our humanity. Searing, sharp, and compassionate, this book evinces a dazzling range of craft, innovation, and emotional intelligence about what it means to be a daughter, mother, teacher, spouse, and woman while locating oneself within a larger social mesh of “peopledness,” with all the tricks and turns of survival. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from this gifted writer.”