The Tree Is Missing

A powerful debut compelled by questions of borders and displacement.

In one story I stay in that city forever, in one I board, and in another I am still waiting.

I am daybreak; I am everywhere.

In The Tree Is Missing, Shannon Kuta Kelly explores the poetics of the border. The collection crosses through non-places, moving between the unnamed and unmapped spaces on the edges of the European city. With remarkable poise and restraint, these itinerant poems experiment with oral history and translation, traversing the borderlines of nation, language and time.

They draw on folklore to evoke a world that feels current and present, but which can only be reached through storytelling. In doing so, Kuta Kelly explores the loss and displacement—the fracture of identity—necessitated by personal and political turmoil. She writes with a restless immediacy from within the histories that continue to shape us.