Blevins's first book of poems, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, was published by Ausable Press in 2003 and won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. In this essay, Blevins argues that Kelly's poem explores how intertwined human consciousness is with its own animal instincts.

"The Satyr's Heart" opens the second section of Kelly's third collection, The Orchard. Because the collection is a sequence of lyric poems that rely on one another for the ultimate narrative of the speaker's quest through an imagined garden of invented, archetypal, mythological, and allegorical demons, "The Satyr's Heart" is difficult to read out of context. In fact, readers might find the speaker's confrontation with herself atop the statue of a sandstone "headless goat man" absurd or worse. For this reason, it is important to read at least the opening lines of "The Black...