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
Praise for Metamorphoses:
"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
"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
"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
