Keeping Up — Allison Blevins

Seven Kitchens Press, 2025

Poems from Keeping Up were first published in Raleigh Review, ellipses . . . literature & art, Whale Road Review, Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Allison Blevins’ Keeping Up is a searing, formally restless elegy for the self as it fragments under the pressure of motherhood, marriage, memory, and mediated culture. These poems do not flinch—they blister. Blevins renders queer motherhood and female rage with startling clarity: “this is the scream all women learn,” her lines aching with what is said and what is swallowed.She tangles pop culture and visual art into a palimpsest of longing, grief, and embodied tenderness. “I love you so much I want to leave you,” she writes, reminding us that even love can be a haunted house we keep walking through. Keeping Up is both confession and reckoning—a luminous, brutal, necessary book.

—Angelique Zobitz, author of SERAPHIM

To say Keeping Up is a book about womanhood is too simple. To say it is a book about the Kardashians is too shallow. To call it ekphrastic: too neat. This book cleverly alternates fine art and episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians as ekphrastic inspiration. These outward reflections become laser sharp inner monologue. Allison Blevins has woven an intricate tapestry pulled together by the tension and weight of expectations. Disappointed expectations and expectations of what may come—the beautiful and the tragic. Her lyrical yet direct language, through this lens of pop culture and visual art, paints a portrait of a woman ill at ease—as a mother, as a partner, as a generational link. We are told to imagine both luscious and unsavory details, with great attention to the sensory experience. We feel the unwanted—and wanted—hands on the subject’s body. We smell the sour milk. We fear the end of love right along with the speaker. In these deceptively domestic, uncomfortably tense poems, the stakes are as high as they get. With Blevins, we wonder: “What if all I leave her is a legacy of female silence?”

—Emily Hockaday, author of Blood Music