Kimberly Ann Priest
Author & Educator
Books
Cover Image
Coming Soon
Floralia
forthcoming 2026
SUNDRESS PUBLICATIONS
“ 'People do you know. [Survive.] Mostly women,' writes Kimberly Ann Priest in her expansive and often disquieting new collection Floralia. Her poems take risks in style and form that make them edgy and keen; and, despite the book’s difficult narrative of missing and exploited women, drug addiction, and the often-precarious struggle to survive, these risks make it a wonder to read. Presently, our culture is so anesthetized to violence that it’s easy to ignore or compartmentalize its terror and its hate. Floralia shakes us out of that complacency and demands we pay attention."
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LYNN MELNICK, author of Refusenik and I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive
"With Floralia, Kimberly Ann Priest takes readers into the aftermath of sexual abuse—the flashes of memory, the gaps, the therapy, the survivor’s strange relationship with her family and her own body. Using flowers as both metaphor and a source of grounding, these poems brilliantly capture thoughts and experiences that are almost impossible to put into words. 'Tell me you are listening,' she says. Yes, I’m listening. Everyone needs to read this book."
KATIE MANNING, Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review
"Grief here is an inescapable weather—every moment has, if not the feel of rain, the smell. In a poetry that is as compassionate as it is beautiful, Priest shows us how even attempting to name a trauma is a nonlinear effort, a heart’s ongoing work."
CHEN CHEN, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
Wolves in Shells
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
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"In the first poem, Kimberly Ann Priest evokes a moment of 'dismantled vigilance—nothing encroaching, nothing to hunt,' and this becomes the quest of these stunning poems as the speaker moves through the effects of abuse and homelessness into a world free of predation. The voice in this book is strong, astute, and vulnerable as the poet reclaims her history and its fragmented beauty alongside the story of a wolf, her totem creature. Priest writes with keen eye and great musical dexterity, creating a book that is both compelling and crucial."
BETSY SHOLL, Maine poet laureate emeritus and author of As if a Song Could Save You
Winner of the Backwaters prize in Poetry
“Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest is a piercing rebuke of ‘our dependency on machinery/ that harms us.' That machinery is patriarchy, marriage, and gender inequality. A blistering chronicle of a life lost—children, home, health—and regained. Muriel Rukeyser asked, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.’ Each of these poems moves with the honesty of an ax.”
TOMAS Q. MORIN, 2024 prize judge and author of Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir
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"Of wolves and shells, holy howls and spirals does Kimberly Ann Priest weave her sacred tapestry of lyrical outpouring; in one poem she writes '…because I feel like thunder often, dance like snow; because I am living.' And her poems are so fiercely alive and soaring and plunging on the page that it both hurts and fills one up to read them. Hers is a startling new voice in American poetry that can never be forgotten."
ROBERT VIVIAN, author of All I Feel Is Rivers
"Wolves in Shells is a powerful collection that details what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century. In it, Kimberly Ann Priest documents a life of resilience after homelessness, abuse, intergenerational trauma, and witnessing the violence of America. Drawing from her cross-country travels and emotional connections to wildlife—particularly the wolves of Yellowstone National Park—Priest illustrates, in captivating detail, the strength of an individual woman who is both hunted and too often harmed, but who ultimately 'become[s] her own pack' to 'survive'.”
SUNNI BROWN WILKINSON, winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize for Rodeo
tether & lung
TEXAS REVIEW PRESS:
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF SHSU
"Like the finest impressionist paintings, these poems’ medium of linguistic light and shadow render the many nuances of a heartfelt and hard-won life, testament to the joys and sorrows of womanhood, motherhood, and marriage. Like the most compelling collections, this book elucidates our understanding of struggles and hopes with utterly unique and surprising tropes."
RICHARD BLANCO, fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of Homeland of my Body
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"With horse (gelding) as totem creature and knife (for the cutting of flowers and food) as totem object, tether and lung moves deftly and with sustained lyric intelligence through a bucolic world in breakdown. Lives, many lives, are at stake in these poems presented with an unresolved and mesmerizingly nuanced clarity that is human and true."
DENNIS HINRICHSEN, author of Dominion + Selected Poems
Slaughter
the One Bird
SUNDRESS PUBLICATIONS
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"These are powerful, courageous poems that are needed in the world—they give voice to the voiceless and they make space for the vulnerable, ultimately showing us the strength to make it through. Slaughter the One Bird is a remarkable collection that reminded me of the incredible power of women poets and well-written poems."
KELLI RUSSEL AGODON, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
"Priest’s poems do the hard work of expanding the language for exploring the experience of abuse and trauma, which means they expand our understanding of (in)humanity. These poems are never predictable. They are like flashes of light in shadowed rooms—dark rooms—with bright, illuminating flashes."
SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN, author of If the Girl Never Learns
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