Accidental Devotions, Kelli Russell Agodon’s fifth full-length collection published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026, is an incandescent and tender exploration of what it means to be human in the confusion of contemporary life, where few certainties exist and where it can feel like “god has left the group chat.” The collection casts us into a modern “divine comedy” (this book is funny—very funny), updated so life on earth and the separate domains of hell, purgatory and paradise are happening simultaneously, multiverse-style; where “[m]iracles exist—and so // do toothpaste and text messages.” While the collection can feel like it’s inspired by Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd, its main guide is Emily Dickinson with appearances by Rainer Maria Rilke. Words and wordplay are guides too, both in synthetic search results delivered to a seeking speaker via large language models, and insights that arise organically as poems generate possibilities on the page seemingly in real time: “life multiplied by ink.”
Multiplicity and plurality are themes that span the collection’s various explorations of technology’s impact on human experience. The first of four sections is titled “Scrolling for God.” The phrase works on two levels (characteristic of Agodon’s layered phrasing), ‘the scroll’ as the modern phenomenon and as scripture and ancient wisdom. Smartphones, emails, text messages, social media posts, search histories and apps populate these poems, with a strong sense of the price technology exacts, the disorienting sense of fragmentation (“I can’t / be everywhere at once except when I am / online”). The speaker is interrupted while touching a friend’s coffin at a funeral:
… This is modern life and the Victorian era
happening at once. This is technology and yes-even-if-you-
have a good-cell-plan-people die vibrating my ass.
Loneliness is the disease of the modern era, exacerbated by the false sense of intimacy digital life creates (“Who can see your tears / behind a screen?”) “Heartrending Posts on Social Media” poignantly underscores how the need to connect, and how communication itself, misfire in the digital domain:
For a moment I read it as heart trending,
as if our humanness was beating
across Facebook and we were sorrow
with a Twitter account—@Grief our username.
More sinister is a poem titled “Alexa, Why Am I Falling Apart?” The voice agent generates a stream of unhelpful suggestions in response to the speaker’s question (“Do you want me to play “Falling Apart” by Papa Roach?”) but also volunteers uncanny observations: “You seem to be in your spiritual crisis era. I’ve added / a gratitude journal to your cart.” It shows its true colors, perhaps, when it asks: “Are you fading like the Book of Kells? I joke—the Book of Kells, / unlike you, is in remarkably good condition.”
If technology creates a fragmenting multiplicity, love and desire’s many forms are enriching pluralities. In “Love Poem in Which Nature is Nonbinary and Uses They/Them Pronouns” a friend asks:
Who decided straight was more “natural”—
it seems more natural to bend, overflow, expand?
The speaker celebrates “[t]he blaze of being more. The brilliance / of being multitudes” in poems about bisexuality and queerness as a counterpoint to “[squeezing] yourself // into a box of what America calls normal.” Dickinson’s letters to Susan Gilbert make several appearances. A category-defying slipperiness informs Agodon’s poetics: writing itself often disrupts what seems to be the subject of the poem, breaking down distinctions between word and world:
… Your poem
is messy and raw because you live
a life you can’t sum up neatly.
The collection’s subjects span internal landscapes of grief, depression, heartbreak and aging, and an external world in the throes of climate crisis: melting ice, floods, wildfires and extinction. Language is engaged in a sustained act of defiance against both technology’s negative dimensions and our failed duty of care toward the planet. Almost every page summons the holy and supernatural in a search for meaning: (messy) saints, (rebel) angels, sacraments, and sirens, witches and Ouija boards. In this “divine comedy” “where God’s checked out and ordering / DoorDash, putting the ringer on silent…,” hierarchies collapse, the sacred is found in the decidedly down-to-earth. Agodon shows our human flaws are both touching and absurd, how we’re picaresque saints enlightened for three hours after a friend’s funeral, abandoning a labyrinth to indulge in a hotel’s fresh-baked cookies, trying to be present but mostly “frustrated in traffic”:
As rebel angels, we wear our halos
as tube tops, nose rings. Make no apologies
for our flame. And when our skin
scorches paper, we revise ourselves
as poems.
Agodon echoes Rilke in documenting “this temporary and perishable world” where poets are “bees of the invisible,” conjuring all we’re losing. Winged creatures, whose numbers are dwindling, abound—hummingbirds, bees, butterflies—and spells are cast for their protection: “[l]anguage plants milkweed / for the monarchs.” Through repetition, language assumes the qualities of ritual and rite and, as in any religion, ascends from mundane to mystical. Three poems carry the title “Devotion to…” and nine, “Accidental Devotion…,” encompassing entities as disparate as smartphones and “borrowed halos.” Prayers and blessings are repeatedly referenced. Images turn into amulets as they appear over again: stars, starfish, shells, cats and forget-me-nots. Jasmine and feathers echo Dickinson, plums Williams. They’re joined by a host of other poets including Sexton, Bishop, Plath, Blake, Whitman and Millay—“kiss the lips of other poets with your poems” encourages one speaker. In “Accidental Devotion in Which My Search History Becomes Prayer,” the search engine has no answer to the speaker’s question regarding the difference between poems and prayers.
“[C]an you start a religion by accident?” asks the same speaker. The tension between what is random, arbitrary and disappearing, and what is meaningful and enduring, is explored in the final section. “I live my life in widening circles,” from Rilke’s Book of Hours, appears in one poem. Themes and fragments cycle, notably in individual poems that combine them in surprising juxtapositions. The collection does build forward momentum, however, as it moves Fibonacci-style toward hope. The human project is unfinished, and modern life can feel overwhelmingly chaotic. But what we create through acts of humanity and simple kindness are essential, though we may stumble on this wisdom accidentally. In “Patron Saint of Typos” keyboard slips (“so good became so god,” “God for you!”) are “sacred blessings” we’ve been inadvertently sharing all while seeming to be “bowing / to the Internet, worshipping / our phones.”
If the prayer of the final section’s title is “unmistakable,” the one that ends the collection is “necessary,” asking “is this is how we go on—not healed / but hopeful?” The book’s last “Accidental Devotion” poem celebrates the desire to live in a world (“dreamscape”) where “every tsunami comes with a magician / so it misses our homes” and “devotion unfolds // from [the] glove box” of a convertible-driving God who addresses the speaker with great tenderness:
… there are no ravines we can fall
from, only feathers we can ride. Hold on
fiercely, Little Love—every route is divine.
“They should have sent a poet”: the line from the 1997 movie Contact appears in the penultimate poem. In the way Agodon’s collection captures the complexity, contradictions, splendor, tragedy and comedy of modern life with such dazzling devotion, I feel they did.
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