Luke Kennard

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Biographical note:  Luke Kennard is a poet, critic, dramatist and pugilist. He is compassionate, but prone to anxiety and bleak introspection. Many have called him polite and quite funny, but add that he suffers from a tendency towards constant nervous laughter and an apparently involuntary rictus of disdain. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Stride Magazine, Sentence, Echo:Location, The Tall Lighthouse Review, Reactions 4, Orbis, 14 Magazine, The Flying Post, Exultations & Difficulties. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for Best Collection in the 2007 Forward Poetry Prizes. He is quite tall.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715558
ISBN:  9781844715558
Author:  Luke Kennard
Title:  The Migraine Hotel
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Apr-09
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  A combination of verse and prose poetry, ‘The Migraine Hotel’ is Luke Kennard’s third collection and very much a sequel to ‘The Harbour Beyond the Movie’. The voices continue to explore the territory opened up by Harbour, at once satiric, stricken, sincere and bitingly sarcastic, combined with a kaleidoscopic range of ways of engaging with a poem as a reader. The prose poems are prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire, which is to say they read more like grouchy comic monologues with unreliable narrators than prose-verse characterised by excessive lyricism.

Table of contents:
My Friend
The Dusty Era
Variations On Tears
And I Saw
Four Neighbours
The Six Times My Heart Broke
Bestiary For The Seven Days
Estate
Wolf Nationalist
No Stars
Pleasure Beach
Army
Wolf on the Couch
Grapefruit
Childhood
My First Impulse is Always to Take the Bigger Portion, the Unchipped Cup, the Cleaner Glass
The Awakening
Painful Revisions
The Forms Of Despair
Repetition
A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children
The Last Days of Advertising
A Dog Descends
Addiction Clinic
Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre
A Sure-Fire Sign
Trombone
Men Made of Words
from Sexual Fantasies Of The Inuit Warriors
Spade
Gravedigger?:?The Movie

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Excerpt from book:  

And I Saw

A false prophet slapped in the face by a wave;
A woman screaming at her clarinet,
‘What would you have me do, then, drown you, too?’
Remaindered novels washed up on the shore.
A cat, baffled by a drowsy lobster, jogged
Over the pebbles towing a little carriage.
And the cat didn’t say anything — because
It was a cat. And the carriage was not full
Of tiny men, a watermelon or an
Assembly of diplomatic mice
Because the carriage was an example
Of man’s cruelty in the name of research.
The cat belonged to a behaviourist
And had been raised in an environment
Of only black horizontal lines. So
It saw my sprinting across the beach
To dismantle its harness as a whirl
Of fenceposts and orange rubber balls
And was gone faster than the better idea
You had a moment ago. Leaving me
Only the seagull’s dreadful anthem?:
‘I just want to tell you how sad we all feel.’
The airplane trail made the cloud a wick —
I thought I saw it starting to burn down
And I knew we had been lucky to avoid
Disaster so far. I shared a bench with
A man who wanted to redefine us
As victims of one kind or another
Instead of whatever names we’d chosen:
Steven Victim, Jenny Victim, Franklin
Victim. I disagreed but couldn’t speak.
He ate raw mushrooms from a paper bag.
In fact it was a computer game called
The Enormous Pointlessness of it All III.
When you are raised on computer games
You grow accustomed to saying ‘I’m dead,’
Several times a day. Which is not to say
We are the first generation to feel
So comfortable with our mortality.

Review quote:  The Migraine Hotel, by Luke Kennard (Salt): Luke Kennard's The Harbour Beyond the Movie was that rare commodity: a poetry collection both excellent and laugh-out-loud funny. His latest offering – in which he considers heartbreak, despair and the pleasures of schadenfreude via his own sui generis brand of didactic humour – doesn't disappoint. Fans will be delighted by the return of Wolf, who this time ventures into the fields of psychotherapy and national identity ("'Fortunately my mother was Opus Dei and my father a Methodist,’ says the wolf. ‘Thus, on Tuesdays, I am Catholic in the mornings and Protestant in the afternoons'").

Sarah Crown
The Guardian

Previous review quote:  Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.

Nick Laird
The Telegraph

Previous review quote:  There is a considerable intelligence and stylishness in his wry domestication of the beautiful swerves and non-sequiturs of Ashbery's poems, plus a high degree of overt self-consciousness: several poems discuss and undermine their own procedures, or disarm potential criticism. Their main charm, though, is that they are – with their engagingly downbeat, faux-naïve narrators – genuinely funny.

Robert Potts
The Telegraph

Previous review quote:  Hailed as a witty wunderkind in the poetry world, 26-year-old Kennard starts with contemporary cultural slickness and moves brilliantly into the surreal. Truly, a poet to watch

Christina Patterson
The Independent