Kennedy, Jake

Canada, (b. 1972)

On Safety (Bricks)

  1. Fuck it. The smartest pig resolves to brick-up the doorway, damn the windows, and stuff the chimney with mortar. Goodbye, remarkable tree: the ten-hut of the trunk, the leaves’ sustained fireworks. So long, apple rotating just so into the sunlight. It’s usually up to the moon (farewell) to spike the wolf’s fur while it sleeps. That’s desire, too, isn’t it? … any thrill—good or bad!—from elsewhere? Well, adios bear shit versus lilac perfume. No more goosebumps, then. The trowel labors against tensions and harmonies—until the bricks make a crypt of unreadable books.

© Jake Kennedy. Light & Char. Vernon BC: Greenboathouse Press (2010).

About the Poet:

Jake Kennedy, Canadian (b. 1972), is a poet, prose writer and teacher. Kennedy was born in the tobacco-land of Woodstock, Ontario and grew up in the big-box-land of Mississauga, Ontario. Now Jake lives happily in the Okanagan and teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College in British Columbia.

Some of Jake’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pissing Ice Anthology: New Canadian Poets, Drunken Boat, Kiss Machine, and The Diagram.

His BookThug chapbook entitled Hazard won the 2006 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Jake also helped edit, with his artist friend Paola Poletto, Boredom Fighters: A Graphic Poem Anthology from Tightrope Books (2008).

Kennedy received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for The Lateral, Snare Books (2010). He is working currently on an entirely made-up (but reverent) biography of New York poet-architect Madeline Gins. Kennedy is also co-compiling, with his great friend Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, Death Valley: a Collaborative Community Novel. [DES-08/14]

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