E. R. Kennedy

E.R. Kennedy’s debut collection, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (2009), was published by Muumuu House. Within a sleeve of narrative storytelling and conversational exchange, Kennedy creates prose poems that explore themes of ambivalence, sex, and longing while shuffling though the throwaway details of daily life. “On the rare occasion that [he] does use metaphor, [he] does so to call attention to their inadequacy, thereby casting the idea of the apt metaphor—so central to the way poetry has historically been understood to operate—into doubt,” noted Octopus Magazine reviewer Kathleen Rooney of Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, who also observed that Kennedy’s pieces “resemble conceptual art at least as closely as they do poetry.”
 
Kennedy co-founded the small press ass hi books and is a poetry editor for 3:AM Magazine. He lives in Boston.