Evan Kennedy

Terra Firmament

ISBN 9781928650348
$16.00
88 pages

With an enormous sense of hope checked by doubt fit to match it, Evan Kennedy demonstrates the heroic in a contemporary landscape. Not only are the proportions somehow believable (huge demands in manageable measure), but the sounds stir us up into our own desire for said demands. In Terra Firmament, a protagonist, Evan Kennedy, crawls, walks, and cycles epic, older English—ear-led, royal lex for the basic route—in search of a paradise: “to make a peaceable kingdom, or a peaceable mixer.” Here, searching and making are both necessary strategies toward that paradise. Going rogue, evoking an alternate order, both sacred and secular, bestial and saintly, Evan calls for community in the service of or in cahoots with an evolution; one that begins nearest oneself and moves outward to include many others. And this is all to take place on earth, on the actual land we stand on. It’s happening presently. – Brett Price

Evan the evan.gelist, helmet-headed bike messenger, song-cycles sideways to the side-real, a paradise not above but on the ground, a ground force not in the future but in the present. Tense but tenacious, firm in fragility, insistently rhythmic in concert with beasts and other brothers, with all existences, he writes a minor fellowship of the self-effacing/self-doubling, in clear-eyed praise. As in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas the Twin, the choice he presents is between world as dead body and world as new place of life. The news isn’t all good. The pen can get umbral. Violence wounds, war lords it, private sorrow, alienation and anger angle in. But Evan Kennedy’s dandified discourse-crossing form, his homo-sexy tendencies, his decent troubadour indecency, stoke the ethical into the poetical. To keep yourself alive is to keep the paradise alive. He does it by writing his canticle of the sum, the I am, the fragment-summa, riding his cycle through 14 stops and starts—well, through more than 14. By not stopping—for good.

--Mina Pam Dick