“[Creely] discover[s] and implement[s], as the book unfolds, a voice that is both intellectually challenging and emotionally engaging . . . Inventorys rewards thinking and re-thinking, reading and re-reading, as all poetry must if it is to meet that ineffable hunger for poetry all readers of poems know, which cannot finally be sated, though it can be pleased. Inventorys pleases that hunger.”

Shane McCrae, judge of the 2022 Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Contest

“Inventorys offers a tour-de-force refusal of linguistic imperialism in six acts. Scattering syntax to the four winds, this awing debut collection excavates the wreckages of colonialism that remain embedded in our shorelines and our language use. Creely’s text traces the trajectory of an eighteenth-century Spanish vessel to offer a threnody for the extracted resources and lifeworlds marked as ‘cargo’ in the ship’s manifest. Crystallizing around the figure of the cochineal insect whose red dyes would stain the sea, Inventorys sets the reader spinning in a tempestuous whorl of lexical items and attunes us to the multispecies distributions of colonial violence. At once elegiac and agitational, this booklingers with histories and presents thatreject the imperative to move ‘forward into forgetting.’”

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, author of The Institute for Other Intelligences

“Creely’s title Inventorys immediately shivers its signifier with an irregular plural that vibrates throughout this collection of poetry as it considers and reconsiders those philological and historical efforts to order and to control a fundamental condition of arbitrariness. The brilliant trope of inventory itself as a traumatic attempt to buffer the flow of production from the raw to the fabricated—from the noumenal to the phenomenal—and to ensure conventions of consumption and exchange is, paradoxically, the book’s own lyrical economy. . . . The shipwreck of the 18th century Spanish colonial frigate El Nuevo Constante along with its monetized prize of cochineal is an almost too perfect metaphor for the flotsam of an age of synthetic rationality appearing as a stain upon the waters, returned from currency to ephemera and consigned to the mud of its own universalist logic. Creely’s genius is to refine the historical epic into exile, into a dirge of loss become private (‘Cochineal cradel me’), into the ‘Slow Rosebud’ of a grandmother adrift in time. Off we go. In lines worthy of Eliot or Beckett, and in a critique worthy of Barthes, this collection, so singular in its periodicity, curates ‘what gathers behind words as they move into quiet / how heavy how creased.’”

on Wagner, translator and editor of "Andrée Chedid: Fugitive Suns"