"Kellie Ann Noftle's I Was There for Your Somniloquy is a thrilling, destabilizing meditation on our divided selves: our split brains and checkered evolutionary pasts. Here we are (in this book): hermaphroditic chimeras talking in what may be our sleep. We'll know once we figure out what consciousness is. In Noftle's arresting debut, we can slip from "comma" to "coma" with frightening ease. These poems are nimble, daring, and convincing. Get ready, if you can, for the things they will convince you of!" --Rae Armantrout, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of at least 13 books of poetry "Awake, reader! You are about to enter the world of Kelli Anne Noftle's remarkable debut volume, I Was There for Your Somniloquy . These elegant, sensual, and reckless poems read like Ovid dreaming of the Twenty-First Century. Kelli Anne Noftle knows that we are all Sleeping Beauties, in our hearts and at our cores, each of us waiting for the hard and singular kiss of the world to bring us to our senses. These wise yet disarming poems remind us -- all of us, not just poets -- that what we hope to speak is often precisely what we have left to dream." --David St. John, author of Study for the World's Body: New & Selected Poems "Kelli Anne Noftle's poems could be called an enchanted science, seeking to reclaim the sense of wonder and weirdness lacking in more typical forms of scientific inquiry. Her work straddles a desire to know something absolutely and an equally strong reservation that no claim, scientific or otherwise, can entirely exhaust mystery from the universe. Noftle's poetry is particularly enchanted with that moment of scientific suspension opening us into the infinite, if only in the form of distance." --Ryan Winet, The Offending Adam "Kelli Anne Noftle writes with her teeth. These poems flex their mandibles, their maxillae. They bear their shiny incisors. They sharpen steel on their own fangs. They brux. And that's an entirely appropriate metaphor for these dual treatments of parasomnia. "I was there for your somniloquy," she writes in "I Follow You All Through the House with My Ears," and I believe her." -- The Nepotist "With this small venture, Noftle tries to solidify the artist's plight, in "making a thing" as she terms it. She is, without question, an artist, and a talented one at that. With backgrounds in visual arts, musical performance (meaning, she is in a fucking rock band!), and poetry, she makes art on all sorts of various subject matter. But here, she gives us a triptych that exhibits the plight of one who makes while reconciling the dilemma of that art-making." --Cody Todd, The Offending Adam
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