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I AM, AM I, TO TRUST THE JOY THAT JOY IS NO MORE OR LESS THERE NOW THAN BEFORE

by Evan Kennedy

The extended title of Evan Kennedy’s new book: I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before describes his subtractive memoir, removing particulars such as time and place to reveal the operations of a spirit and the body it animates. Short lyric essays meditate on routines and habits, as well as elusive pleasures like reading and travel. These topics serve as prompts for exercises of attention and examination of its lapses. Deeper into the book, the speaker’s anatomy is pared away, resulting in a voice engaged in direct address, attempting devotion.

People are Saying:

“Evan’s got what Townes Van Zandt would call ‘his Flying Shoes on!’ I mean this memoir’s strictly in the future preterite, gnostic or late-Platonic in spiritual abjection. A detritus of personal anecdotes leading on, excitedly, to friendly abstractions, nothingness, ongoing destructions and metamorphoses.

‘My book is a mop that accelerates its efforts at absorbing my fluids whenever I accelerate my destructing body.’

So, to be the poetic person/saint that’s aspired to, mustn’t one then disrobe oneself of the body, little by little peel off pieces of flesh, the sinews, nerves, organ cavities, then all body functions themselves? Are there requisites left?

‘When you indicate a form of life, my biography becomes no longer expressible to me. I choose you to resume my narration,’”
–Bruce Boone

Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist residing in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press), The Sissies (Futurepoem), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya), Shoo-Ins to Ruin (Gold Wake Press), and Us Them Poems (BookThug). He runs the occasional press, Dirty Swan Projects, and was born in Beacon, New York, in 1983.