Ennui Prophet
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Singular and deeply pleasurable. Christopher Kennedy's prosetry is a lonely anarchic nation-state unto itself, half vacation funspot, half eerie purgatorial layover."—Dave Eggers
The poems in Ennui Prophet, Christopher Kennedy's fourth collection, range from deeply personal explorations of relationships with family and friends, to examinations of the political climate in the first decade of the millennium. Whether personal or public, Kennedy gazes through a slightly distorted lens to better see the world around us.
Christopher Kennedy's previous book, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions Ltd., 2007) received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He directs Syracuse University's MFA program in creative writing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hip and inviting, Kennedy's short prose poems rarely fail to entertain: "I'll buy you a reason to live if you promise to share," one says, while another visits the "Museum of Wrong Turns," finding "something for everyone: cowboy boots worn by former presidents," for example. The language of slightly retro rock and roll ("The next release shall contain no electric guitars") takes over some pages that feel like very short stories, while others run in the sinuous American-surrealist grooves set by, say, Russell Edson: "the bees formed two lines and flew into my ears, where they crowded my head like thoughts of a long drought." Kennedy (Nietzsche's Horse) runs the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse: this third book of prose poems (his fourth book overall) shows his clear mastery of several prose-poem forms, with lyricism, jokiness ("Amish Radio"), non sequiturs, sadness, and even a bit of cultural criticism to boot. It might be hard to say, in a world choked with prose poems and short-short stories, what sets this particular company apart. And yet that demurral is no knock on the individual poems, such as the one about the "Dream Horse" with the "smaller horse, galloping" inside it.
