Unbalancing Act is a haunting collection of poems about the particular physics of loving and losing—about the way grief, desire, memory, and awe can tip a life off its axis, and right it again. The speaker moves through fire and water, childhood, intimacy and abandonment, always with one eye on the natural world: bears, whales, rivers, storms, animals sleeping in impossible ways. The poems are lyric but narrative-driven, often darkly funny, and fascinated—bordering on obsessed—with the strange facts and small surrealities that make ordinary life feel mythic.

At its heart, the book is about imbalance as a kind of truth: the way trauma warps time, the way love can feel like weather, the way the body keeps trying to survive even when the mind wants to disappear. It's a collection for readers who like their beauty a little feral—poems that are tender but not precious, intelligent but not academic, and emotionally sharp without ever losing their sense of wonder.

M.M. Kelly holds an A.B. in Political Theory from Princeton University, a J.D. from The University of Virginia School of Law, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. After studying at Virginia Law, she co-edited and contributed to the Law of War Anthology Lifting the Fog of War: New Thinking about War and War Prevention. She is also Founder and Lead Guide at Backcountry Academics, an elite academic and admissions consultancy. Her poetry has appeared in The Asheville Review, Consequence, Hanging Loose, Jabberwock, The Shore, and elsewhere. Unbalancing Act is her first collection. She lives on a farm in Virginia with her shepherd dog, Huckleberry.