About the Book
One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Poetry Books for Spring 2023
Metamorphoses springs from Ovid's epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity, its propensity for change and transience. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life, Evan Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval.
With a range of reference from Roman household Gods to San Francisco poetic titans to musical celebrities like Madonna and Bob Dylan, Metamorphoses confronts change as an inevitable molecular process.
About the Author :
Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist. He is the author of I Am, Am I, to Trust the Joy That Joy Is No More or Less There Now Than Before (Roof Books), Jerusalem Notebook (O'clock Press), The Sissies (Futurepoem), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya), Shoo-Ins to Ruin (Gold Wake Press), and Us Them Poems (Book*hug). He runs the occasional press, Dirty Swan Projects, and was born in Beacon, New York, in 1983. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Review :
Praise for Metamorphoses:
"Ovid’s Metamorphoses takes on a new hue in Kennedy’s magical work. Drawing on ancient Rome, the details of his own life, and the epochs that divide them, Kennedy considers nature, the body, and other matters against the backdrop of modern-day San Francisco.”—Alta Magazine
"Kennedy stands on the literary foundations of Ovid and Kafka as he exalts the beauty and transcendence of the natural world while intersecting the fluidity of sex, gender, and spirituality....Kennedy's collection echoes a deep, timeless human longing to be understood and kept safe."—Michael Ruzicka, Booklist
“With a leer as feral as Pan’s and a resignation as inventive as Ovid’s, Evan Kennedy’s new book feels like witnessing the marriage of the Delphic oracle with Madonna. Witty and insouciant, learned and inventive, Metamorphoses is an amazing, sexy book.”—Peter O’Leary, author of The Phosphorescence of Thought
“The devotional and visionary poet, the rare writer of consciousness, the still small voice and “confounding microclimate,” Evan Kennedy—whose prior triumphs include a “subtractive autobiography” and a lyric account of self mapped onto the works and canticles of St. Francis—continues his ecstatic project by widening, maximizing his embrace. How else “account for everything” but to “take the forms of all living things”? Of scale, plume and pelt; of petal and bark, here he occupies Ovid like a dressing room, busily “cutting confetti for the day I make a wildlife sanctuary of my body.” It may be this is the debut of a new genre: the auto-treasury.”—Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies
“Kennedy’s poems enact a cross-epochal, trans-global set of impersonations with famous writers in a giddy quest to locate his true voice. It’s a breathtaking heartbreaking ever-inventing whirlwind of language, marked by a voracious hunger for history, and a bit of post-punk bravado queered to the max. Stripped of self-aggrandizement, and awake to the nuances of San Francisco life, he invites us to join him in a discovery of self, and to participate in the recovery of our lost world and its mesmerizing particulars.”—Aaron Shurin, author of The Blue Absolute
“Think of him as a circus Beckett or a Beckett circus or an early Dylan of the early twenty-first century. Think of the pleasure of language as it rises and as it ebbs. Think that you know what to expect and you will be surprised. Meet the author. Evan Kennedy. Say it again. Evan Kennedy. He is The One.”—Lisa Jarnot, author of A Princess Magic Presto Spell
Praise for Evan Kennedy:
"What stands out most in Evan Kennedy’s poetry are its interlinks. What might appear at first as stylistic or syntactic innovation, and indeed is also that, turns back in order to link or relink the various delusory tenses (past, present, future) of a biomass of innocence or humility, Blakean maybe, or Wordsworthian.”—Bruce Boone, Jacket2
“Kennedy seems actively interested in having the writing be identifiable with everybody and anybody’s experience. Yet Kennedy is in essence only thereby revealing the process beneath which his practice lies. Intent upon pushing such identification deeper than mere surface associations Kennedy embraces activities/routines that could belong to ‘just about anyone,’ thereby shedding much of himself in search of the shared preoccupations of others in order to write anew the freshly forming ideas of self out onto the page.”—Patrick James Dunagan, author of After the Banished
“His language—some kind of nouveau sermon—breathlessly conjures divine presences while in delis bagging radishes, while scaling impossible hills with baseball bros and sordid queerphobes, barrel-chested men and sneaky sickos.”—Noah Ross, author of Swell
