The desert enters Keelan's poems not so much as heat but as dryness, the clarifying aridity of the prophet wandering the desert in sackcloth, beating upon his hand drum and clacking his finger cymbals. Keelan's refusal to seduce her readers may seem at first to be a rebuff. Her poems, at first reading, may seem too difficult, too hermetic, too much of mind. However, there is music here, albeit percussive. One is well advised to accept the invitation that the poet proffers to her readers in the Notes: "The reader is welcome to sing along in the empty spaces." Although this invitation refers to "Gravity and Grace," I think it is appropriate to many of Keelan's poems. I would suggest, perhaps, a chant. I find that when I chant "Gravity and Grace" out loud the poem begins to open and expand. I then sense the possibility of entering the poem.

Keelan seems to be writing "against" language poetry, although not out of rejection for such poetry; for her, the material of language is not sufficient, however delightful the game. Keelan is a truth-seeker. Language, for her, is an ethical necessity. However, we are faced with "language's irreparable/ backwardness, its continual/ substitution of interpretation/ for perception." Language is "a code losing the ability/ to decode." To avoid these sterile habits of language, the poet must or will step outside the conventions of English. She claims that it is better to "be" true than to "appear" true. Correctness is not what she's after. "Errors" will be committed knowingly in order to sidestep the "domination" of "imitation." The text remains open; the poet leaves gaps for the reader to write in or sing in or think in. For these poems seem to me primarily poems of thought and vision, "In that I had a way of seeing/attached to my feeling."

In these first years of the twenty-first century, Keelan is writing the full ethical sweep (both transcendence and debacle) of the twentieth: oppression, Holocaust, and nuclear end times actively, yet non-violently, engaged in the manner of the social, political and spiritual vision of Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and Simone Weil.