Joseph Kidney

Poems

Available from icehouse poetry

Advance praise for Devotional Forensics:

Joseph Kidney’s Devotional Forensics announces a poet of delicate intellect, generous spirit, of vulnerability and a persuasive authority. Kidney seems to me a philosopher–poet doubling as “sentry guarding the ruin from repair.” Rather than fixing things, why not allow them to become what they will, and call that allowance a form of generosity, of understanding? For, “[n]o matter / how narrow the mesh of the net, things crumble free, / having earned the privilege of breaking,” which might be a good thing, says Kidney: don’t “some kinds of pain / perfect themselves into a sweetness”? These poems contain plenty of sweetness, but there’s no naivete here; the camaraderie of friends, the dark and bright particulars of the natural world—none of these erase life’s other, more banal, troubling truths, for instance the 24-hour Walmart whose “stale bossa nova / cuts routinely to commercials for missing children.” The book’s all-inclusiveness reflects Kidney’s large-heartedness, made all the larger by his honesty: “I should promise to be kinder,” he says at one point, as if intention might have to be enough. One of the many gifts of Devotional Forensics is its affirmation that, in our brokenness, we are human, we are flawed, and we can be humane.

—Carl Phillips, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020

“There’s a reason for pouring salt in a wound,” writes Joseph Kidney. “It tastes so much better.” These are poems that employ the perfect amount of salt, each line revealing the flavours of the surface without obscuring its subjects. In fact, the world in this collection feels realer, more vivid, rendered in Kidney’s expert wit and music. An impressive debut, one to savour and reread.

—Kayla Czaga, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award-winning author of Midway

Astonishing, painful, elegant. The dramatized crises in Devotional Forensics set terms for themselves nearly impossible to resolve, then go about picking their way toward that same precipice. The marriage here of precision image, riverine syntax, feeling, and music with what used to be called “quest,” or “struggle,” marks Joseph Kidney’s work out as arriving sui generis yet somehow also hauntingly familiar, as though we’d forgotten we were in this much trouble.

—Ken Babstock, Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author of Swivelmount

Devotional forensics: to investigate, with almost scientific rigor, the sources of one’s own devotions. In conducting his dazzling investigations, Joseph Kidney spares no tool, from the deceptively quotidian—more than one poem treats the subject of trash—to the arcane—from Reformation theology to the rarer species of linguistic flora and fauna: puns, oxymorons, contranyms. Yet this honed wit and blade-sharp intelligence belie a wisdom born of suffering: “whenever you refine the edge of a blade, / you shave a sliver off.” Here is a poet who set out for the impossible and was rewarded by that “more total mastery on the other side / of control.”

—Armen Davoudian, author of The Palace of Forty Pillars

Reviews of Devotional Forensics:

“Devotional Forensics presents us with something truly remarkable: the first, full flowering of a truly original poetic talent. Nothing and no-one sounds like Joseph Kidney. Everything about his poetry has that priceless weirdness that is the mark of an art whose originality is won at great effort, with deep reflection. He writes poetry both of the highest ambition and of the greatest vitality, and his voice will resonate in the world of Canadian letters over the course of many decades to come.”

–James Dunnigan in The Miramichi Reader

“Indeed, the sheer phrasal inventiveness Kidney brings to bear is truly impressive….the talent on offer here is (have I ever used this word in criticism?) prodigious….Kidney deserves favorable comparison to Solie and a further acknowledgement that the sheer thickness, in his work, of religious imagery, history, and practice integrated with contemporary life is vanishingly rare and even more rarely done well.”

–Shane Neilson in The Washington Independent Review of Books

“Almost everything is on the playing field in Joseph Kidney’s poetry, actually, and the smart collection of disparate ideas and references makes this debut enjoyable as all hell.”

-Chris Johnson in Contemporary Verse 2

“[an] exceptional debut collection”

-Bardia Sinaee, Arc Poetry Magazine

Interview with Benjamin Libman in The Cortland Review about Devotional Forensics

Available from Anstruther Press

INDIVIDUAL POEMS: