Clues from the Animal Kingdom

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 Nietzsche’s 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 McSweeney’s. 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.

"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. Christopher 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“The wildly imaginative, poignantly perceptive prose poems of Christopher Kennedy’s new book, Clues from the Animal Kingdom, weigh romance and hope against failed resurrections and absent gods, against the ghost and ‘the ghost’s shadow.’ One is reminded of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, as well as Simic’s elegiac, stark microcosms, but the revelations here are pure and distinct―indelibly Kennedy’s: ‘A black dog looked in my apartment window. Its eyes were as black as its face. Its face as black as a bible. I stared into its bible-black eyes and saw my reflection.’ I’ve dog-eared so many poems, if for nothing else, for their lyrical clarity and their devastating beauty: ‘our animal hearts accelerating inside us, as we lay beneath the bone-white seriousness of the moon.’” ―Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest