Devotional Forensics by Joseph Kidney

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.

(From Goose Lane Editions) 

Joseph Kidney is a writer originally from B.C., now working as a lecturer at Stanford University. His previous works include the chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea. Kidney's poems have been featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc, Vallum, The Malahat Review, Oberon, The Fiddlehead and Periodicities, among others. He won the Short Grain Contest from Grain and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2 for the best poem by an author under 35, and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Bedford International Poetry Award, The Malahat Review's Far Horizons Contest, The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize, a Canadian National Magazine Award and the Arc's Poem of the Year three times.