Light & Char
Jake Kennedy
¶ Light & Char is a series of 15 prose poems, each playing within and without the confines of binaristic thinking to explore the productivities stored in the nexuses of, say, yes-no worldviews, right-wrong logics, abstract-concrete divisions, happy-sad categorizations, life-death paradigms. Much of the umph of the poems is derived from a poetic strategy of what-ifs: what if nails were earthworms, what if skyscrapers grew down from the clouds, what if knives could breathe? The title of the collection – as it invokes both illumination and darkness, whiteness and blackness, growth and decay &c. – necessarily places its emphasis on the cobra-like tension of the ampersand.
Jake Kennedywas born in the tobacco-land of Woodstock, Ontario and grew up in the big-box-land of Mississauga, Ontario. His BookThug chapbook entitled Hazard won the 2006 bpnichol Chapbook Award. Jake also helped edit, with his artist friend Paola Poletto, Boredom Fighters: A Graphic Poem Anthology (Tightrope Books) in 2008. Most recently, Jake received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for The Lateral, forthcoming from Snare Books.
2010
5.75" × 9.75", 28pp. 95 + I-XX copies.
$100
ISBN: 978-1-894744-28-7
Copies available, .
Colophon:
Set by hand in Frederic Goudy’s Garamont (cast by Jim Rimmer in New Westminster, BC) and printed on a Vandercook 15-21 at the Greenboathouse Press in Vernon, BC, as May rains give way to warm spring sun. Printed on Magnani Velata and bound into a stiff paper wrapper handmade by Reg Lissel in Vancouver. The edition is limited to 115 copies: 95 numbered copies for sale, and 20 copies (I-XX) for private distribution, all signed by the author.