Singing in the Ruins: A Review of The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly

The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf 2025) by Donika Kelly

Love is a subtle current in Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf 2025). Collecting work written in stolen moments and composed alongside students, the book explores how lyric helps see, hear, and feel those things that might be otherwise inaccessible to the senses: “So much has happened / that I would never have known / I could remember.” Like the emerald cicada that adorns the cover, buried for years in the earth, Kelly’s poems emerge with a deep desire to sing. And sing they do, of family, of trauma, of the hearsay of history, and of the weight of white supremacy and American empire. Through it all, these poems sing of love and all the awkward joy, contentment, and bewilderment it entails.

A book of becomings and transformations, The Natural Order of Things gets rolling after an insight discovered in the first of two poems titled “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things.” There, Kelly’s speaker observes Fiona the baby hippo, who was born premature in the Cincinnati Zoo in 2017 and quickly became a viral phenomenon. Beginning with short, imagistic stanzas depicting the hippo “stumbling and new in its enclosure,” the poem turns on the speaker’s realization that “Hippo baby, little river horse, / you should be in a river” instead of a zoo. And then declares, “O Donika, you should be in love.” This self-address opens the rest of the collection, which asks to what extent we might believe love is the natural order of things in light of, well, all the other things.

Donika Kelly

This paradox is precisely formulated in the absolutely haunting “I never figured out how to get free,” which finds the speaker avoiding and indulging “the war … all over my hands.” Implicating all of us in the phone enabled voyeurism of death and destruction that is the feed-driven news cycle, the poem intersperses violent conflict with the mundane pleasure of day-to-day life:

      … I ate my hamburger. I ate
      my pizza, I ate a salad or lentil soup,
      and this too was the war.

How do we find joy when we have blood on our hands? In song? In poetry? In love with each other? In addition to the two reminder poems, scattered throughout the book are two more series of poems: four self-portraits and three visits to “The Bone Museum.” In the self-portraits, the speaker longs to discover and understand themself “as a Body, a Sea,” “as a Woman Who Kneels over Her Beloved’s Face,” “with a friend,” and, in a triptych as “The animals that come to live as my body.” These searching poems tangle the human with the nonhuman animal, with the landscape, but especially with the sea, figuring an evolution from “a body schooling, / a ball of fish” to “my tortoise self / My crab self … My body soft, / pushed back / into the sea.” In these permutations, Kelly reconfigures the puzzle of identity and agency constrained by the natural destiny of all life.

At “The Bone Museum,” the speaker confronts the finality of that destiny and wonders “who have we walked over to be here” as they look for “the ripple of kinship” in the ruins of the bones. Woven around these groups are occasional poems (for example, “I found myself careless in the crossing,” “In the beginning,” “After Scissoring for the First Time at Thirty-Three,” and “I did not mention the moon but it too showed out”). The effect of this structure is grounding and destabilizing at once, hinting at a natural order, some kind of plan, while leaving room for the sporadic, traumatic, and euphoric. These structures give the book an irregular rhythm and tension between more introspective and relational lyrics and more rhetorical takes on history and nation.

Kelly’s poems vibrate with a rhythm and melody uncommon in contemporary lyrics. In interviews, she speaks about her love for the language of Arkansas, where she grew up. In that language, often AAVE, Kelly finds the sounds and structures that elevate her poems into lyric. The most powerful evidence of Kelly’s lyricism drives “Its gone be what it is,” which begins with a rhythmic meditation on that phrase:

          we say its gone be—its gone be—its gone
          be—its gone be—its gone be what it—

                    its

           gone be what it—

                    its gone be what it—

                        what

          it is—what it is. lemme aks you sumn.

Developing into an extended consideration of ancestry and place, “Its gone be what it is” locates memory in language as it reminds us that “any of us soon” could be “long gone.” Looking back “all / we have left is what we say, and what we / say, young blood, before the end and at it, / is: its gone be what it is.” Like the visits to “The Bone Museum,” which place the body and the self in conversation with the impermanent persistence of the bone, the musicality of “Its gone be what it is” demonstrates how language offers structures for experience and understanding that provide rhythm and variance to existence. And language, like family, is an inheritance, like the trauma of history.

Some of the most forceful poems in The Natural Order of Things (including “Its gone be what it is”) confront persistent legacies of oppression and white supremacy. In the vituperative “We Came Here to Get Away from You,” for example, the speaker meets a “volunteer” stopping to see the suspended skeleton of an orca. For this white volunteer, the speaker’s Blackness recalls the Emmett Till exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and she shares her desire to visit Till’s grave. “I hadn’t thought to think / of him here,” the speaker says before excoriating the volunteer’s desire in a series of graphic images that masterfully tie together that desire, history, and the skeleton of that black and white orca whale.

The soaring “What I Might Sing” follows directly after “We Came Here to Get Away from You” and develops the previous poem’s experience in Port Townsend, Washington, into a meditation on America: “I was thinking too of America, what I might sing of it,” Kelly writes while considering Whitney Houston’s singing of the national anthem and the LA Uprising of the 1990s. “What I Might Sing” places the individual (the speaker and her grandmother) against “the machine of the state doing its oldest work” and meditates on the language of pledges, promises, and national anthems; why Whitney, why anyone but especially Black folks might sing of America:

          America, thinking of you, on my rumble home,
          the anthem I used to sing along to, my hand

          finding my heart because I was young
          and yielded to most things. And still, listen:
          Whitney sang the shit out of that song.

          Marvin too, the year I was born, his shades
          a mirror. This poem a mirror

          I keep turning away from. All parts,
          no whole, and damn near nothing
          worth standing for.

“Damn near nothing / worth standing for,” but only damn near. There is still Whitney. And Marvin. And the poetry of The Natural Order of Things , which leaves us considering our place in our bodies, among our people, in our nation, in the world. Kelly’s third book shows a poet approaching the height of her powers wresting language to her purpose, and it is often a wonder to hear and behold.