C36 Contributor RICHARD KELLY KEMICK’s Debut Poetry Collection
Have you read Kemick’s Caribou Run?
CAROUSEL 36 contributor Richard Kelly Kemick recently released his debut poetry collection, Caribou Run, with Goose Lane Editions. Kemick’s poetry, prose, and criticism have been published in literary magazines and journals across Canada and the United States, most recently in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Fiddlehead and Tin House. His work has won national awards, including a National Magazine gold medal, and has been accepted into Canadian and British anthologies.
“At one moment, a pure abstraction; at the next, an incontrovertible presence of hooves, antlers, and fur. The beating heart of this assured début by Richard Kelly Kemick is the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic. In Caribou Run, Richard Kelly Kemick orchestrates a suite of poems both encyclopedic and lyrical, in which the caribou is both metaphor and phenomenon; both text and exegesis. He explores what we share with this creature of blood and bone and what is hidden, alien, and ineffable. Following the caribou through their annual cycle of migration, Kemick experiments with formal and thematic variations that run from lyric studies of the creature and its environment, to found poems that play with the peculiar poetry of scientific discourse. to highly personal poems that find resonance in the caribou as a metaphor and a guiding spirit. Running the gamut from long-lined free verse and ghazal form to tightly controlled tankas and interwoven rhyme schemes, Caribou Run serves notice that a formidable new talent has been let loose on the terrain of Canadian poetry.”
:::: Buy the collection HERE
:::: Read Kemick’s short story, ‘Flour Child’, in CAROUSEL 36