BiblioVault - Books by Kell, Charles

Cage of Lit Glass

Charles Kell

Autumn House Press, 2021

The debut poetry collection of Charles Kell, Cage of Lit Glass engages themes of death, incarceration, and family through a range of physical, emotional, and philosophical spaces. In startling images of beauty and violence, Kell creates a haunting world that mirrors our individual and cultural fears. Boldly engaging with the absurdity, strain, and horrors of life, Kell’s poems expand upon the lineage of writers such as Kafka, Beckett, and Rimbaud.

Cage of Lit Glass follows multiple individuals and points of view, all haunted by various states of unease and struggle that follow them like specters as they navigate their world. Kell’s poems form blurred narratives and playful experiments from our attempts to build lives from despair. A tense and insightful collection, these works will follow the reader long after the book is finished.

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Cage of Lit Glass

Charles Kell

Autumn House Press, 2019

The debut poetry collection of Charles Kell, Cage of Lit Glass engages themes of death, incarceration, and family through a range of physical, emotional, and philosophical spaces. In startling images of beauty and violence, Kell creates a haunting world that mirrors our individual and cultural fears. Boldly engaging with the absurdity, strain, and horrors of life, Kell’s poems expand upon the lineage of writers such as Kafka, Beckett, and Rimbaud.

Cage of Lit Glass follows multiple individuals and points of view, all haunted by various states of unease and struggle that follow them like specters as they navigate their world. Kell’s poems form blurred narratives and playful experiments from our attempts to build lives from despair. A tense and insightful collection, these works will follow the reader long after the book is finished.

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Ishmael Mask

Charles Kell

Autumn House Press, 2023

Poems that consider the instability of identity through fictional and religious characters.

In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell reminds us that identity is precarious. Kell’s collection is a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers—from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville’s Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat. Each poem strips back the mask and beckons us to witness humanity in its barest forms. Captain Ahab’s leg, Ishmael’s arm, and Pierre’s severed head serve as invitations to consider hunger and hope. The inspirations behind these poems—the Bible, Heraclitus, Melville, Guyotat, Tomaž Šalamun—are transformed by Kell, conjuring dreamscapes both dazzling and haunting.

Ishmael Mask masterfully allows a glimpse into the human experience of feeling lost—even when right at home, even in our own bodies.

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Taxi from Another Planet

Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe

Charles S. Cockell

Harvard University Press, 2022

Insightful, good-humored essays on the possibilities of alien life and the uses of space exploration, based on an astrobiologist’s everyday conversations with his fellow humans—taxi drivers, to be precise.

If you’ve ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there.

Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn’t life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism.

A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.

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