Clues from the Animal Kingdom

(Paperback)

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Clues from the Animal Kingdom is Christopher Kennedys fifth collection. Christophers first BOA title, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death, won the Isabella Gardner Award in 2007.

Many of the poems in this collection deal with the subject of grief and depression. A sense of lossand a quiet acceptance of loss as a constant companionpermeates the book, and the collection offers both a window into the experience of living with depression and hope for those experiencing mental illness.

Christopher is the director of the Syracuse University MFA program in creative writing, one of the top MFA programs in the country.

As with Christophers previous books, Clues from the Animal Kingdom embraces the prose poem as a formal entity and experiments with the musicality of sentences within each piece, which results in highly lyrical fusions of poetry and prose.

Reviews

"A haunting, complex, and very beautiful book. Kennedy has a deep understanding of American longing and the inevitable losses associated with that longing, and, because he is a powerful artist, is able to make from that loss a wonderful victory: this moving portrait of the human heart examining itself." --George Saunders

"Singular and deeply pleasurable. Chris Kennedy's prosetry is a lonely anarchic nation-state unto itself, half vacation funspot, half eerie purgatorial layover. There is joy and dread here, in every carefully considered line, and evidence of a brain committed to giving shape to the thoughts we keep in a small box, on the top shelf, of our darkest, dankest closet." --Dave Eggers

Author Bio

Christopher Kennedy is the author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018) Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011), Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press, 2003), and Nietzsches Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001). He is one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), published as part of the Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, and McSweeneys. In 2011, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship for Poetry. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.