"These poems venture deeply into that place where, “What never happened will never change.” It is that place where our past regrets, lost loved ones and former selves live on. But in Kenny’s vividly imagined poems it is not a haunted place. It is alive with the sounds of birds, wind, surf; filled with larkspur and moss, hawks, squirrels and crickets; the smell of mud, old houses, smoke and rain-drenched trees. In language so subtly pitched, paced and modulated it captures our attention without drawing attention to itself, Kenny draws us into discovering that what never changes is all around us in the ever-changing world, that one is only approachable, knowable, bearable through the other. We trust her to be our guide because her vision is so unwavering. She refuses to turn aside from anything she perceives, but this resolve hasn’t hardened her. To write or read such poems requires a deepening of empathy and compassion."
- Martin J. Farawell, Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

Intensely focused, compressed, and sharp-edged, these prose poems by Adele Kenny take the spiritual journey into heightened awareness of experience, place, and identity. Deliberate fragments, the language of dreams, and an occasional nod to the surreal combine with Kenny’s signature elements of striking imagery, lyrical precision, and compelling immediacy to inform an enhanced vision of the ways in which the interior life intersects with the outside world. These poems startle, surprise, and tell us things about ourselves that we didn’t know.

Also by Adele Kenny: WHAT MATTERS

Praise for WHAT MATTERS:

These poems are eloquent, candid, straightforward and genuine.
- Robert Pinsky

In Adele Kenny's finely wrought meditations on grief and loss, she never forgets that she's a maker of poems; in other words, that the poem in its entirety is more important than any one of its utterances, phrasings, or laments. What Matters straddles two of the exigencies of the human condition: diminishment and endurance. It abounds with poems that skillfully earn their sentiments.
- Stephen Dunn