Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic is to Canadian poetry what Francis Ponge’s steaming brioches are to Parisian cobblestone. In other words, this is a book that revels in the that-which-gets-left-behind and is just plain old fascinated with the plop of things. Metaphor is plundered as a doorway into the attic of the basement of objects and animals and phenomena, and inside you’ll find poem-studies about hammers, tigers, grass, fire, cat piss, killing floors and many other oh my’s. You’ll also find several poems about the works and days of artsy folk like Samuel Beckett, Cy Twombly, Gertrude Stein, Kathe Kollwitz, Louise Bourgeois, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, and John Cage. Dear Reader, you’ll even find to your everlasting enjoyment a pantoum about your keyboard and a sestina about your (sorry!) George Bush. You’ll also see a lyric flashing devil horns. What else? Why, a poem about the sea, a poem about a moose, a poem about a frying pan. Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic is object-stew—please eat it up, yum.

Jake Kennedy is the author of two poetry collections: The Lateral (2010) and Apollinaire's Speech to the War Medic (BookThug, 2011). His work has appeared in literary journals across Canada, the US, and the UK, including The Capilano Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and The Awl. Kennedy is the recipient of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Hazard (BookThug, 2007), the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for The Lateral (2010), and the Robin Blaser Award for Poetry for the long poem "Futuromani" (2011). He also received a BC Arts Council Writing Grant in 2013. Kennedy lives in Kelowna, BC, where he teach English literature and creative writing at Okanagan College. Connect with Kennedy on his blog (shared with Kevin McPherson Eckhoff) www.gmorningpoetry.blogspot.com or on Twitter @GmorningPoetry.

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