A local poet recently shared his new book of poetry at Seven and One Books. The newly published collection offers readers the opportunity to pause, to consider how they are engaging their lives.
Poet Brian Kelly says his new collection, Ripe Moon, explores one of literature's oldest tensions: the individual versus society.
"The central figure, the hero if you will, of Ripe Moon is the personification of theage-old struggle between the self and society, the individual and authority… what the world wants you to be and what you need to be."
Kelly is no stranger to the arts; he's worked as a painter, cartoonist, and fiction writer, but says poetry is where everything comes together for him. In fact, he's been writing poems since the second grade. Kelly says writing it, pushed him deep into uncomfortable personal territory.
"I really had to go into things that made me uncomfortable or go into the subconscious to figure out things from the early years."
Kelly says the book asks a simple but timeless question: Are you living for yourself, or foreveryone else? Ripe Moon’s collection of 83 poems gives readers the chance to reflect on that question for themselves.