Description
Book SynopsisA 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.
Trade ReviewInventive, 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 *
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 *
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
