About the Book

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. 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.

Watch Jon Riccio interview Charles Kell about his “Oblivion Letter.”

Praise for Cage of Lit Glass

This beautiful, unsettling book is a riveting must-read. Cage of Lit Glass restlessly illuminates the injustices of our corruptive class-based society, where trauma, poverty, and incarceration are pernicious, inextricable realities for far too many Americans. Kell fully participates in these vital daily struggles, as they are re-enacted with startling lyrical precision and hallucinatory surreality. These are not comfortable meditations considered from a distanced reserve. Instead, they’re full of outrage, eroticism, and unpredictable passions. I love this book: its exquisite calibrations, its insistent excavations. Charles Kell is a writer to watch.
—Peter Covino

Charles Kell’s poems bring out the authentic in all of us. In Cage of Lit Glass he presents an unreal world, and yet these confines are not imaginary. The cages are also not stable: we learn that “[t]here is a phenomenon amongst / former prisoners where after release / they begin to reconstruct the very / dimensions of the cell they once / were housed in.” We learn that if you wish to read a poem, you may as well carve the lines on your wrist. By creating such poems, the reader is separated from their comfort zone, and this is a marvelous feat. After all, awareness is powerful poetic.
—Kimiko Hahn

The cages in this book are more than metaphors: they are real. Yet when released from any one of them, one is not free: something imaginal remains, immovable, bending with the remover to remove. In the same way, the poems in this book are more than real. They will taunt you with their reticent truculence, enclose you within their translucent opacities.
—Timothy Liu

Charles Kell is the author of Ishmael Mask, (Autumn House Press, 2023.) His first collection, Cage of Lit Glass, (Autumn House Press, 2019) was chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Recent poetry appears in The Threepenny Review, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor at the […]

Learn More

Related Books