Welcome to the Web site of poet Danielle Sellers. Danielle has received numerous awards for her poems, which have been widely published in literary journals across the country. Her first collection, Bone Key Elegies, was released from Main Street Rag in late 2009.

Don't miss Danielle Sellers reading from her collection, Bone Key Elegies, at Voltaire Books in Key West!
See the schedule for details.

Purchase a copy of her book

Loss impels the eloquent poems of Danielle Sellers's Bone Key Elegies, which commemorate their beloved dead by richly evoking specific moments in the past, in the deep history of place and of a family's lives. "How close I came to jumping in," she writes in the book's last poem, of having to bid farewell to the canal "behind the house / I've lived in twenty years" -- and Bone Key Elegies is no stranger to despair. But luckily for us all, the jumping-in takes place instead in the poems themselves, and we are privileged to experience their strange and beautiful waters.

--Ann Fisher-Wirth

You can't get farther south in America than Danielle Sellers's moving first book. Here at Bone Key, things turn upside down. Death takes an infant sister first, before a father, a friend, a grandmother. The ocean's allure, its creatures and aromas, empower Sellers's poems in their fight to stave off destruction, the way her grandmother "sweeps the sea from her kitchen" after a hurricane. Sellers knows the "sheet metal dorsals" of tarpon, the "stingray, eagle ray, horse-eyed Jack," and men transformed into "fish or fool," swimming after women, "mouth open, kissing nothing but the sea." Bone Key Elegies animates the brackish world at this dangerous edge of America, where everything lives close to the bone.

--Jay Rogoff

What Frost did for New England, Danielle Sellers does for the Florida Keys, shaping a world out of words that feels deeply observed, richly lived. These poems present a place where "a boy with too much muscle swirls / a soapy rag over his El Camino," where bridge fishers sit beneath "evidence of their mis-casts / twined and dangling from power lines," where young girls "use mangrove limbs as monkey bars" while "Navy jets scream overhead." Shaped by and shaping this fraught landscape are the generations of a family that haunt the speaker's efforts to feel at home, and haunt her efforts to escape: a grandfather who piloted an oil tanker, a father who could "spear a hog fish and roast it before it was dead, / squeezed lime hissing the fire down," and a younger sister movingly eulogized after a fatal car accident. These are poems to read, and reread, and to be shared, and they are as beautiful, tragic, and ancient as the place they describe.

--Beth Ann Fennelly