BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 28-Apr-09 | ISBN: 9781844715558 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 96pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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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

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“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

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS

“Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.” —Nick Laird The Telegraph

“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

“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

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Luke Kennard is the author of four volumes of poetry and two pamphlets. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.