Shoo-Ins to Ruin

Author: Evan Kennedy 

Publisher: Gold Wake Press (2011)

"Sho-Ins to Ruin is actually five essential experiments in one volume. Our language is put to work in a variety of ways. It is fossilized and piled up, or it dashes ahead driven by romance as in the Knight Scenes, 'a lasting indentation on the air' where the poet assumes the form of a crusader talking to himself, passing through an epic, ever changing landscape. Evan Kennedy's phrasing is bound to be imitated. Only by aligning certain words together do we ever truly hear them on their own. I am reminded of the most obscure Stein (Painted Lace), Rimbaud, Herrick, Coolidge and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts—sheet music that makes my blood run clear! He is writing out of his mind, where even cast off lines have their own pull and rhyme."

–Cedar Sigo

"Think of him as a circus Beckett or a Beckett circus or an early Dylan of the early twenty-first century."

–Lisa Jarnot