Donika Kelly’s new — and first — book is called BESTIARY (Graywolf, paper, $16), and it is in many respects a typical poetic debut. It’s a prizewinner, for one thing: In any given year, more than 25 first collections will appear as the result of contests, the black hole around which the galaxy of American poetry now rotates. And like most prizewinners, it was selected by a more senior poet (in this case Nikky Finney) and sports an introduction that seems to have been fueled by at least a gallon of coffee. “Keep reading,” Finney advises, “and you realize this poet rests her alphabets in the mythology of fire and the resurrection of ecstasy.” There is a method to this gonzo prose, believe it or not. If you’re committed to the idea that poetry deranges the senses, but you’re also routinely asked to introduce books conforming to the thoroughly mundane strictures of the average writing contest (“Manuscript must be paginated, with a font size of 11 or 12. . . .”), then it may be tempting to use your preface to deposit some alphabets in the fire of ecstasy or whatever. It’s a way of resolving, or at least obscuring, those “conflicting imperatives.”

But the framing of a book isn’t the book itself, nor is the launching of a career merely a matter of being paraded across the stage. There are also the poems, those balky players, which remain what they are (or aren’t) regardless of the scenery that encompasses them. Kelly’s writing in “Bestiary,” fortunately, is striking enough to weather the spotlight. Kelly is a descendant of Sylvia Plath by way of the wintry Louise Glück — her poems are animated by roiling, mostly dark emotion, but they’re spare, composed and often quite short (of the more than 40 poems here, only three stretch to a second page). The tone ranges from guardedly tender (“I play a little song in the key / of your name”) to self-critical (“My ashen body / and untrimmed nails”) to almost clinically brutal (in a poem about Pegasus: “Foaled, fully grown, from my mother’s neck, / her severed head, the silenced snakes”). Her diction is just formal enough to give her lines an appealing unnaturalness: Words like “cur,” “apportioned” and “perpendicularity” buttress conventionally poetic mainstays like “body,” “love” and “light.” There aren’t many jokes here (notwithstanding the wink in a title like “Sonnet in Which Only One Bird Appears”), there are relatively few nods to popular culture, and there’s not a single reference to philosophy or theory.

Image Max Ritvo Credit... Ashley Woo

What appears in abundance, as you might gather from the title, are beasts — albeit symbolic ones. That is, of course, in the nature of a bestiary, which in its medieval incarnation joined animals real and fantastical with the moral qualities they supposedly represented. (From the entry for the elephant in the 12th-century “Aberdeen Bestiary”: “They never fight over female elephants, for they know nothing of adultery.”) In Kelly’s hands, the concept becomes a way of thinking about construction — of a self, a life, a story of a life — and the potential failure that always haunts such projects. “Bower,” for example, is one of three poems here about the bowerbird, that diligent engineer:

Consider the bowerbird and his obsession

of blue, and then the island light, the acacia,

the grounded beasts. Here, the iron smell of blood,

the sweet marrow, fields of grass and bone.