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A combination of verse and prose poetry, 'The Migraine Hotel' is Luke Kennard's third collection and very much a sequel to 'The Harbour Beyond the Movie'. The voices continue to explore the territory opened up by Harbour, at once satiric, stricken, sincere and bitingly sarcastic, combined with a kaleidoscopic range of ways of engaging with a poem as a reader. The prose poems are prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire, which is to say they read more like grouchy comic monologues with unreliable narrators than prose-verse characterised by excessive lyricism.
List of contents
- My Friend
- The Dusty Era
- Variations On Tears
- And I Saw
- Four Neighbours
- The Six Times My Heart Broke
- Bestiary For The Seven Days
- Estate
- Wolf Nationalist
- No Stars
- Pleasure Beach
- Army
- Wolf on the Couch
- Grapefruit
- Childhood
- My First Impulse is Always to Take the Bigger Portion, the Unchipped Cup, the Cleaner Glass
- The Awakening
- Painful Revisions
- The Forms Of Despair
- Repetition
- A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children
- The Last Days of Advertising
- A Dog Descends
- Addiction Clinic
- Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre
- A Sure-Fire Sign
- Trombone
- Men Made of Words
- from Sexual Fantasies Of The Inuit Warriors
- Spade
- Gravedigger?:?The Movie
About the author
Luke Kennard was The Poetry Society and Canal & River Trust's Canal Laureate from 2016-7. He is the author of four collections of poetry and a novella called Holophin (Penned in the Margins, 2012). His first book, The Solex Brothers, won him an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2005. His second, The Harbour Beyond the Movie made him the youngest poet to be shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. He has also published two chapbooks, Planet Shaped Horse (Nine Arches, 2011) and The Necropolis Boat (Holdfire Press, 2012) which won the Poetry Book Society's pamphlet choice in 2012. A Lost Expression was published by Salt in 2012 to critical acclaim and his fifth collection, Cain, was published in 2016 by Penned in the Margins. He is currently working on a collection inspired by the Book of Jonah. Notes on the Sonnets, a series of reactions to 154 Shakespeare sonnets, will be published by Penned in the Margins in 2021. His literary criticism has appeared in the TLS, Poetry London and The National.Luke Kennard lives in Birmingham. He was born in Kingston-upon-Thames and grew up in Luton. He has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once per-decade list of poets "expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade".
