Aaron Kiely is an American poet associated with experimental poetry communities in Boston and New York. His writing is marked by repetition, plainspoken intensity, bodily attention, memory, family history, emotional vulnerability, and a deliberate pressure on ordinary syntax. He also played an important role in Boston literary life as a founder and early organizer of the poetry gathering that developed into the Boston Poetry Marathon.
The Best of My Love
The Best of My Love, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005, is Kiely’s first book of poems. Its three pieces, “Poem,” “Novel,” and “Untitled,” move through trauma, family memory, selfhood, love, adulthood, and the body by means of recurring phrases and small variations. Repetition gives the book both its musical structure and its emotional persistence.
Repetition and variation
Kiely’s poems often return to the same words until their emotional value changes. A phrase can begin as assertion, become question, gather memory, and finally sound like an incantation. This method gives simple vocabulary unusual pressure and allows shifts of feeling to emerge through rhythm and recurrence.
Body, memory, and trauma
The body in Kiely’s poetry carries memory directly. Childhood scenes, family relationships, desire, fear, shame, and hopes for connection enter through physical experience and repeated statements. The resulting poems can feel exposed and quiet at once, holding difficult material inside restrained language.
Suburban scenes and personal history
The Best of My Love draws on recognizable American settings, family rooms, music, television, apartments, adolescence, and remembered conversations. These details give personal history a concrete setting. Domestic scenes become places where emotional patterns can be observed with unusual clarity.
Boston Poetry Conference
Kiely founded and ran the Boston Poetry Conference from 1998 through 2000. The event brought experimental poets from different cities and traditions into the Boston literary community and later developed through several names into the long-running Boston Poetry Marathon. Its early history connects Kiely’s writing life with a broader commitment to readings, exchange, and independent poetry culture.
Torch
Kiely edited Torch, a magazine of poetry and visual art, from 2002 to 2013. Editorial work extended his involvement in contemporary poetry beyond his own poems, creating another setting for writers and artists to appear together.
Where to read Aaron Kiely
Ugly Duckling Presse presents The Best of My Love, its publication history, and biographical context. Boston Review discusses the collection in a review of independent-press poetry, while the Boston Poetry Marathon oral history records Kiely’s account of founding the conference. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and poetic forms.