Ennui Prophet

By Christopher Kennedy

New collection by Isabella Gardner Award Winning poet.

Author directs one of the top five MFA programs in the country, Syracuse University.

Author is a leading American prose poet; this is his fourth consecutive prose poetry collection.

Dry humor and accessibility mix with poignant topics of a personal nature (a loved one suffering from Alzheimer's Disease) and the post-9/11 American society that we all live in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Jun 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781934414781

Christopher Kennedy

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.

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Title Page

I

No Wonder

The Fact Remains

Need Some Eyes for Your Next Puppet?

Congruence

Ennui Prophet

Transubstantiation

Grief Season

Ghost in the Land of Skeletons - for Russell Edson

My Mother Listens for Birds

Hypoglycemia

In the White Hour - for S.

Amish Radio

Dream Horse

II

End of the Ten-Foot Summer

Church of the Holy Abattoir

Act V

Wicked Go the Doors

The Year I Was Sick

Questions of Metaphysics

After Christmas

Are You Looking for the Self-Help Section?

Museum of Wrong Turns

The Brown Heroin of Love

The Day Before My Violin Broke

Aloha

The Rise and Fall of the Middle Class

Song of the Elysian Troubadour

Why

Salt City Solo

III

Searching for Ancestors

Down to the Sea in Sinking Ships

Stopped by Cops in South Carolina Where the Billboards Shift from Jesus to Porn ...

They Are World Travelers

Post-Romantic Post-Mortem

Still Some Interest in the Heathen Gods

Humor Is the Arbiter of Sadness

Rasputin’s Folly

My Argument with the World, Part 3

Where Does the Carpathian Highway Roam?

For My Students

Tombstone Hand

A Vague Memory of Wings

The Unimaginable World

Rara Avis

Mandala

Waking Up at the Wheel

Acknowledgements

About the Author

BOA Editions, Ltd. American Poets Continuum Series

Colophon

Copyright Page

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

—Paul Valéry

How smart are you?

How dumb am I?

Don’t count any of my advice.

—Paul Westerberg

I

No Wonder

As it happens, I was thinking how the earth curves always away, how we spend most of our time fighting gravity, how death leaves a body heavier, harder to carry, how we go through each day accepting this, how it’s no wonder we pay to sit in the movie theatre so fear can jolt us and make our bodies lighter as our hearts race, as the hero conquers and the villain repents, and our eyes adjust to the absence of and sudden confluence of light, like a newborn’s, and it’s no wonder that we move differently in the dark, the false night unspooling around us, as the larger lives of others move to the music that closes down the evening, and we see only what we want to see.

004

The Fact Remains

I’m heavier than some animals, lighter than others. Also, I’m more threatening than most animals, less threatening