Winner, Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Prize
Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
With dazzling wit and brittle tenderness, multi-award-winning poet Joseph Kidney catches all in his highly anticipated debut collection. Kidney's rich, innovative imagery finds the durable in the contemporary and articulates a new vision of human vitality from inside a world that always seems on the verge of ending.
Channeling influences as wide as Shakespeare and Anne Carson, Virgil and John Ashbery, Devotional Forensics takes full advantage of the liberties of language, playing with its boundaries. This formally inventive collection exalts the ordinary and fleshes out the metaphysical, constructing theologies out of wildfires, classical music, and garbage collection, while engaging seamlessly with everything from renaissance literature to family intimacy, from modern art to biological science. At once timeless and urgent, Kidney's poems dance through all the miniature apocalypses that compose the evolution of time into history. Joseph Kidney's Devotional Forensics announces a poet of delicate intellect, generous spirit, of vulnerability and a persuasive authority. Kidney seems to me a philosopher–poet doubling as "sentry guarding the ruin from repair." Rather than fixing things, why not allow them to become what they will, and call that allowance a form of generosity, of understanding? For, "[n]o matter/how narrow the mesh of the net, things crumble free,/having earned the privilege of breaking," which might be a good thing, says Kidney: don't "some kinds of pain/perfect themselves into a sweetness"? These poems contain plenty of sweetness, but there's no naivete here; the camaraderie of friends, the dark and bright particulars of the natural world – none of these erase life's other, more banal, troubling truths, for instance the 24-hour Walmart whose "stale bossa nova/cuts routinely to commercials for missing children." The book's all-inclusiveness reflects Kidney's large-heartedness, made all the larger by his honesty: "I should promise to be kinder," he says at one point, as if intention might have to be enough. One of the many gifts of Devotional Forensics is its affirmation that, in our brokenness, we are human, we are flawed, and we can be humane. "There's a reason for pouring salt in a wound," writes Joseph Kidney. "It tastes so much better." These are poems that employ the perfect amount of salt, each line revealing the flavours of the surface without obscuring its subjects. In fact, the world in this collection feels realer, more vivid, rendered in Kidney's expert wit and music. An impressive debut, one to savour and reread. Astonishing, painful, elegant. The dramatized crises in Devotional Forensics set terms for themselves nearly impossible to resolve, then go about picking their way toward that same precipice. The marriage here of precision image, riverine syntax, feeling, and music with what used to be called "quest," or "struggle," marks Joseph Kidney's work out as arriving sui generis yet somehow also hauntingly familiar, as though we'd forgotten we were in this much trouble. Devotional forensics: to investigate, with almost scientific rigor, the sources of one's own devotions. In conducting his dazzling investigations, Joseph Kidney spares no tool, from the deceptively quotidian-more than one poem treats the subject of trash - to the arcane - from Reformation theology to the rarer species of linguistic flora and fauna: puns, oxymorons, contranyms. Yet this honed wit and blade-sharp intelligence bely a wisdom born of suffering: "whenever you refine the edge of a blade, / you shave a sliver off." Here is a poet who set out for the impossible and was rewarded by that "more total mastery on the other side / of control." Devotional Forensics presents us with something truly remarkable: the first, full flowering of a truly origi
