Kennedy, Evan: Metamorphoses

City Lights Publishers, paperbackPublication Date: March 21, 2023Publisher Marketing: A pagan elegy for the U.S., superimposing ancient Rome over San Francisco, Evan Kennedy's Metamorphoses seeks affirmation in change. "What stands out most in Evan Kennedy's poetry are its interlinks. What might appear at first as stylistic or syntactic innovation, and indeed is also that, turns back in order to link or relink the various delusory tenses (past, present, future) of a biomass of innocence or humility, Blakean maybe, or Wordsworthian."--Bruce Boone, Jacket2 Metamorphoses springs from Ovid's epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life, Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval. Like a fever dream over Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Kennedy has one foot in Ancient Rome an