Kimberly Campanello

Kimberly Campanello's previous work includes the poetry-object and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019). Her latest poetry collection An Interesting Detail is published by Bloomsbury Poetry, and her debut novel Use the Words You Have is the inaugural title from Somesuch Editions, the new imprint of BAFTA and Oscar-winning production company Somesuch. Extracts from her work-in-progress This Knot:  A New Version of Dante’s Commedia with the Poet K have appeared in Firmament and Poetry Ireland Review. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

Kimberly Campanello is based in York and was born in Elkhart, Indiana. She has lived in France, Italy, and Ireland (where she became a citizen). Campanello’s work stretches across poetic modes, from lyric, prose and narrative, to visual and digital, to translation, improvisation and performance. Her collection An Interesting Detail includes prose poems and poetic sequences. The former have been described by poet Phil Terry as ‘startling…like those of Rimbaud, [they] surprise us with something rich and strange, plunging us into a world that hovers somewhere between blog and myth’. In the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, poet Fran Lock has described Campanello’s sequence ‘form ever follows function’ as ‘a particularly useful lens through which to understand the interplay between “innovative” and “lyric” forms, and the anxiety that surrounds both modes of practice for contemporary working-class women.’ Ultimately, Campanello uses the full range of formal approaches available to 21st century poets to attend to complex political, historical and personal contexts and traumas. 

Her visual and concrete ‘poetry-object’ and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019) addresses the state and religious-run Mother and Baby Home institutions in Ireland. MOTHERBABYHOME has been discussed and taught extensively in Ireland, Britain and internationally. In Poetry, Politics, and the Law (Syracuse University Press), Adam Hanna describes the innovation and ethical orientation that characterise this work: 

As Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME reminds us, though poems can never substitute for legal scrutiny, or replace the need for the pursuit of justice by a legal system, we should nevertheless not underestimate what they can do. They are spaces that exist outside the narratives, and therefore the elisions and erasures, of the state. Indeed, as is the case in Campanello’s poetry-object, they can enact new forms in which these elisions and erasures become visible. In this way, poems can be, in the words of John Keats that Seamus Heaney quoted in ‘Writer and Righter’, ‘a remembrance’.

Campanello is known for large-scale projects that require long-term commitment to sustain and complete, as in MOTHERBABYHOME and her current project, This Knot:  A New Version of Dante’s Commedia with the Poet K. She likewise undertakes innovative collaborations with fellow poets in modes ranging from an interactive digital website, to a limited-edition letterpress publication. She is an inaugural Markievicz Award winner from Ireland's Arts Council and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht with Dimitra Xidous and Annemarie Ní Churreáin for (S)worn State(s) (The Salvage Press, 2024). With Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media, she was awarded an Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award for sorry that you were not moved (2022), created in conversation with Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Performance has always been a key feature of her creative practice, and critics and audiences recognise the care and vitality she brings to sharing her work. Poet Pádraig Ó Tuama has described the experience of watching MOTHERBABYHOME in live performance: ‘Campanello is an extraordinary poet. I heard her recite in Belfast and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It is a confrontation, a lamentation, a powerful objection and a revolution.’ 

In recent years, Campanello’s writing has been informed by her experience of young onset Parkinson’s disease. She was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice Award from Arts Council England to continue this work on disability and illness. These experiences are powerfully explored in her poem ‘Moving Nowhere Here’ (Granta’s most-read poem in 2023), as well as in her work-in-progress, This Knot, her versioning of Dante’s Commedia. 

Since she began working on Dante’s text in 2024, This Knot has gained attention from the public, critics, and Dantisti, as Campanello explores Dante’s vitally relevant ethical, moral, and political preoccupations. She describes her aims for Book 1: Beginning Imperfectly Wanting (the equivalent of Inferno):

I approach my version of Dante with procedures, rituals, maps, and other voices, in and out of time. The archive is vast, and it is made of skins of long-dead animals and trees and traces of hands copying, commenting, annotating, redacting, falsifying, digitising. Just as a fifteenth century folio of the Commedia is described in the British Library catalogue, I begin imperfectly, and I am wanting the desired (not side) effect of translation – or is it my Parkinson’s medication – in the face of degeneration. The pain lifts when I carry Dante’s words over, a knot with many threads, still attached to the loom.

Campanello’s work is underpinned by what she calls, ‘the knotty power of language to change states – changing understandings of the law and the State, changing emotional-physical-spiritual-intellectual states, and changing its own state as each word shifts and morphs with every use and encounter.’ She tells the story of the transformative power of language in her aptly titled novel Use the Words You Have (Somesuch Editions, 2025), which traces the coming-of-age of the young poet K. The poet K reads Arthur Rimbaud and spends the summer in Brittany where she has an intense affair – with language and a lover. Poet Caleb Klaces describes the novel as: ‘a deep and curious exploration of what it’s like to live in a new tongue, a brilliant account of the power of language to remake identity, and a plunge towards the source of poetry.’ 

Indeed, the poet K features across Campanello’s work, including in the Commento sections in This Knot and in prose published in magazines. The poet K enables Campanello, and the reader, to inhabit the role of the poet with the power of poeien, as described in ‘Essential Material’ (Tolka magazine):

In this made thing, K. can become ‘I’, a self that is timeless, but not essential. This made thing allows me to say to you, the beautiful woman who has died, You are missed. This made thing says we must make, regardless of the material, despite ourselves. This made thing says we must intervene for what is essential.

Campanello is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds, where she was hired in 2018 as the first Programme Leader for the inaugural BA English Literature with Creative Writing, going on to foster the expansion of Creative Writing and supporting the University’s partnership with the UK’s National Poetry Centre in Leeds, spearheaded by UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.