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A first book of rare clarity and meticulous care, Mele honors the duality of inheritance. Each of its lines carries the irreducible beauty of what's been passed down from mother to daughter. But inheritance, generated in part through loss, is also responsibility. Mele transforms obligation into the gift of continuance, keeping love in circulation through remembered story and fresh new song. "this is how I hold you now," Kalehua Kim writes to her mother, though these large-hearted poems hold all their loved ones with quiet passion, grace, good humor, and just enough side eye to keep it real. 

- Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man

To read Kalehua Kim’s Mele is to sing through the mossy tendrils of grief - each poem a lush, shell-echoed invocation. Full of visceral language, lyrical rhythm, and expansive form, these poems are layered with matrilineal love, dreamscapes, familial sonnets, contrapuntals, generational choruses, elegies, and tender interiority. Reading Mele is like pressing a plump poem to your face: “I roll the mango over my face    we are cheek to cheek    my mother and me      oh, the ripeness of memory.”  Speaking across earthly and ancestral worlds, Kim’s poems feel like offerings, replete with chickens and yams and radiating care. This is an evocative collection I will be returning to often, opening up each valve of my heart like “ slices of sea cucumber strewn on the ocean floor,/ waiting to multiply.”

- Jane Wong, author of How to Not be Afraid of Everything and Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Kalehua Kim’s debut collection Mele is a song of a singular voice who carries the voices of generations in her beat. Kim’s poems do not shy in the face of pleasure or sorrow in their artful tending of the many forms of love – from erotic, domestic, and romantic love, to the love of mothers and daughters, aunties and fathers, and the enduring bonds of family, land, and ancestral memory. Thrumming beneath every poem is the figure of the mother as we move with the poet through personal and cultural grief to her awakening into her own deeply rooted harmony. Full of surprising turns of both delight and heartache, these are courageous poems that will tune your heart to song. 

- Jennifer Elise Foerster author of The Maybe-Bird

An empty bowl, a heavy whetstone, the keloid of a scar—I finished Mele carrying images of such lyric exactness that I was reminded once again of poetry’s fundamental work of mourning and singing. In poems that map out the grief that comes from a central loss, Kalehua Kim gives new stories for the oldest of things—mothers and mothering, family and place, memory and language.  “I write poems. I write poems where I can touch you,” a speaker says to a beloved in one poem, affirming the fierceness of each poem in Mele as an act of holding, an act of devotion.  

- Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

In elegant poems that leap into song Kalehua Kim’s new collection tracks the lessons from the living and pairs them with music of our past, hemming together stories of motherhood, our origin stories, and the people who hold us and who are held back by what haunts them. Familial, the poems urge the practice of love and loving that combines wisdom with the practical know-how raising chickens, raising children, and raising the stakes of what it means to care deeply and how devastating are the potential losses. Meleteaches us the deep instruction of what it means to be alive.

- Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets