In the Away Time
After two years in an intense relationship that breaks apart, Kristen E. Nelson is left to pick up the pieces. In the absence of her lover, she imagines, she collects impassioned break-up stories from friends, and she writes. In the Away Time is an evocative book of epistolary prose poems that attempt to confront, process, and reanimate the dead relationship over a six-month period of the aftermath. Through time and space, these intimate lyric vignettes construct a lush, immersive, and devastating portrait of queer desire and longing grounded in the specificity of one lived experience.
“Spare and scalding, Kristen Nelson’s In the Away Time is a record of, and reckoning with, ruinous love. In the vein of Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain, here is an obsessive return to the site of the wound that hurts as much as it heals. In lyric prose, Nelson’s use of the disintegrating refrain embodies the felt sense of loss over time like no other. This very particular queer, gender-fucking heartbreak will be felt and remembered by me and by anyone who has been ‘subsumed into the no one, into the everyone else.’”
—TC Tolbert
“In the Away Time reveals an aching and kaleidoscopic portrait of Queer and tender loss, reminding us that ‘Love exists in pain or right beside it.’ Kristen Nelson masterfully renders the raw and intimate undersides of a deeply feeling and devastating epistolary tapestry. Nelson evokes a rare and vulnerable magic on the page ensuring, ‘you will understand that this is a spell even if you do not understand its intention.’ It's a work that will stay with me for a long while, rising in my chest like a heart murmuration and reminding me to be brave, open, honest, and ultimately, free.”
—Angel Dominguez
“Here it is: the gospel truth about heartache. Kristen E. Nelson crafts the syntax of desire, submerges it in absence, and places it on the altar of the page. And on that altar? Things happen. Lamentations and incantations exchange places. Hunger and grief fuck. I love this book. I love how true it feels regarding the severity that sugars want. Maybe this book is a sort of spell—I can’t stop feeling what was conjured through its repetitions and I want to read it again and again.”
—Selah Saterstrom
2024 | ISBN: 978-1-957392-29-5
Autofocus Books
the length of this gap
One of the most powerful, breathtaking bodies of poetry fortifying the will to survive. I am an enormous fan of Kristen Nelson's poems and am always excitedly anticipating the next poem showing me the better parts of our species and how to love and thrive!
—CAConrad
Death is not always tragedy, but then again, neither is love – its encounter, its ennui, its wound. Kristen Nelson’s the length of this gap revels in passionate ambivalence, gliding between emotions without netted hearts to catch her fall. Oh foolish bravery! Sorrow becomes lust and lust becomes abandonment, and Nelson makes me want to be bolder, hotter, sexier – and I crave. These poems persuade my addiction.
—Lily Hoang
In the length of this gap, Kristen E. Nelson does the trembling work we so often try to avoid. Here she makes eye contact with the abyss – seeking to understand how we metamorphose in the moment of (and days, weeks, years following) inexplicable loss. This is a book of great courage, striving to put the world back together with long lists of what now is and can become. How thankful I am to have her and her work as my guide – she who dares to “wish to go back and walk through the wasps,” and returns full of “love and love with some commas.”
—TC Tolbert
2018 | ISBN: 978-0-9978267-7-7
Damaged Goods Press
