No. Hope Street

In this remarkable collection, Kelley White sends us poems from /No. Hope Street, an address where "even the postman wears ashes." Homeless families, abandoned infants, a place where kids' "dreams of flying" get shot down every day. Dr. White's poems jolt, and yet compel, the reader to witness the culture of hopelessness that exists beneath the American Dream. "There is no little story about suffering," she writes. "It is all a big story." And yet "No" may not be the final address on Hope Street. Embedded in these poems are glimmers of strength, endurance, care, and even hope, as "over the boarded-up world / a little bird / harries a hawk." In No. Hope Street, Kelley White, speaks to us as a healer, a witness, and a staggeringly powerful poet. -Jack Coulehan, M.D., author of The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems

"There is no little story about suffering," Kelley Jean White says in this book enriched by life experience earned over decades as a physician, a keen sense of irony, and a sensitivity to innocence and humanity peeking out amid images of bleak brutality, cruelty, and chaos. The speaker of these poems is garrulous, breathless to share everything as it happened, to make our consciences flinch, and her words enact empathy and community with the downtrodden. "Truth is, they've / come for me also," she owns. These poems will come for your heart.

-Jenna Le, M.D., author of poetry collections Six Rivers, A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora, and Manatee Lagoon