[In the following review of A Transparent Tree, Mobilio states that Kelly adds a new dimension to the short story genre.]

“Telling is one thing, and hearing another,” says the ancient reciter in “Calf of Gold,” the opening tale in A Transparent Tree. Though the fictive act is infinitely interpretable, often both obvious and obscure, few writers embrace this paradox as completely as Robert Kelly has in his first collection of novellas and short stories.

Kelly, dauntingly prolific author of more than 40 books of verse, dismisses the distinction between poetry and fiction as “scarcely necessary.” The description of prose as “poetic” usually connotes elaborate metaphor and stylized diction. Kelly gives us this and more; his stories flash with insight yet thrive on enigma, seem tightly built but feel porous and open-ended, using language to simultaneously say and deny the ability to say at all. No doubt this is fiction, but it's fiction that synthesizes narrative form and poetic thought.

Poetry or prose, certain trademarks abide. “Cities,” a Calvino-like Baedeker of imaginary civilizations, offers the densely textured geography and exotic esoterica familiar to fans of Kelly's verse. “Where shall I take myself,” our tourist begins, “with my ostrich luggage and my peacock pride”? Amid the magical landscapes of Tibet and North Africa, he discovers secret towns where war is waged by cloud-borne curses and theologians devise hallucinogens. Each city embodies some utopian ideal. In New Harappa, a poet's paradise or hell, prose is unknown and all communication takes place in metered verse. Even more to a bard's liking might be Kominolomon, where “all forms of sloth, especially intoxication” are sacred. But Kelly, it seems, prefers the perfect city of Wuara, whose citizens disregard appearance and change their sex as easily as their names.

“A Winter's Tale” plumbs the imaginative realm of a disintegrating marriage. Brief epiphanic paragraphs (“Let love remember her original face. Shock of the shift from other to own.”) range through the mind of a despondent husband contemplating the murder of his wife and children. Internal voices evoke memory and myth, raising domestic banality to almost epic proportions. The novella “Samuel Naked,” which charts a wounded Civil War veteran's journeys in the West, has a similar structure. Its delicate prose poems move from a meditation on the nature of God to sensual reverie: “Her face at night complete. All he had been coming towards was there. He entered, and remembered.” Kelly varies tone and perspective, shaping a rhythm that mimes the flow of aimless travel and the mind's dreamy circling. In this hypnotic atmosphere, he undoes logical connections—“Music is when winter comes”—reminding us that a poet is at work.

The most traditional and most gripping story is “The Guest,” narrated by an ageless spirit who takes up tenancy in the complacent soul of a young New York woman. Kelly's updated vampire legend turns frighteningly realistic because her manifestations of demonic possession—emotional isolation, waning identity, rogue fear—read less like Gothic scare tactics than symptoms of urban schizophrenia. Within its captive, the incubus exalts: “She was the stadium of my excitement and the large library of my research.” The phantom's movement in the “subtle channels between her womb and heart” allows Kelly to explore women and their sexuality—terrain much covered in his poetry. In the narrative mask that fiction provides, a second person is present and calls attention to itself. Invasion by the Other not only reflects the power of erotic love, it suggests mutual infiltrations by author and narrator.

All possible readings are encouraged here. These 11 stories are “trying to be everything,” Kelly admits in his afterword; his ambition energizes the collection, inspiring us to join the creative fray. A Transparent Tree isn't a book for those who like their categories clean and their reading effortless. By manipulating ambiguity and contradiction, poetry's warp and woof, Kelly adds a new dimension to the storyteller's art.