Follow the Bees, by K. Jay Kilmer

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features. K. Jay Kilmer doesn’t come from a poetry background. These poems came out of necessity, not intention. They are rough-edged, honest, and grounded in lived experience. The collection moves through grief, mental illness, identity, and memory without trying to resolve or explain any of it. The poems don’t ask for attention. They just show up. The work shifts between quiet and rupture. Some pieces are tight and restrained. Others fall apart midline. There are raw moments throughout. These poems exist in the fractures of life, in the tenderness, the chaos, and the absurd, where meaning distorts and emotional truth sharpens. Sometimes that truth arrives in a whisper. Sometimes it wears feathers and tells you to follow the bees. The poems rarely explain themselves. They trust the reader to finish the thought. K. Jay Kilmer became a poet the hard way. He is not a product of any writing program. He just writes what won’t leave him alone: gritty, strange, sometimes tender, always honest. A husband, a father, and a librarian, in that order, he lives in northern Indiana with his wife and two ridiculous dogs.