Collected Poems

Louis Jenkins' poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. He published nineteen collections of poetry and also co-authored a play, Nice Fish, based on his work with the celebrated actor Mark Rylance. This volume includes the poems published in his lifetime, along with a selection of fragments. Louis Jenkins is one of a kind, an absolute original whose art, while it often begins in everyday vicissitude, manages nonetheless to arrive, in poem after poem, at metaphysical insights that make it profoundly clear just how strange it is to be alive-- and stranger even still, to have a place to stand. The sense of seeming indirection in these poems, their strategic wandering, in the space of a single sentence, into feeling states as numinous and surreal as those rare, uncanny dreams that have somehow managed to stay with us for a lifetime. These are wonderfully funny, serious prose poems. Louis Jenkins is an unsurpassed master of the form.

A lifetime of words and thought have given us this stunning collection of poems. The early poems in lines evolve into the prose poem format. His poems, always accessible, amuse while also offering routes to unexpected yet very human emotions and recollected experiences.

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