Us Them Poems

Us Them Poems is a series of twenty prose poems about those who carry out a secret agenda and those who all of a sudden and unavoidably find themselves in dissent. Whistle blowers confront bell ringers, spoon benders battle restaurant owners, umbrella makers cast suspicious glances at parasol designers, and seventeen additional moments are pushed to a crisis. As these poems illustrate in a fusion of Donald Barthelme and Gertrude Stein, it has come time to pick sides, as even the yawning and thumb-twiddling are called to take loyalty oaths. Us Them Poems is a field guide, a how-to manual, a wartime ration book, a directory of unseen craftsmen overlooked in contemporary American poetics. If war is the destruction of good restaurants, as Pound maintained, Us Them Poems is the three course meal that has been prepared, though the shrapnel has yet to be picked out.

Think of him as a circus beckett or a beckett circus or an early dylan of the early twenty-first century. Think of the pleasure of language as it rises and as it ebbs. Think that you know what to expect and you will be surprised. Meet the author. Evan Kennedy. Say it again. Evan Kennedy. He is The One. – Lisa Jarnot.

Evan Kennedy grew up in Texas and has lived in several neighborhoods in Brooklyn.