New River Breakdown

Terry Kennedy, Associate Director of the MFA writing program at UNCG, editor of the online journal storySouth, and associate editor of The Greensboro Review, recently published a collection of prose poetry titled New River Breakdown.  The collection, published by Greensboro's own Unicorn Press, includes 44 of Kennedy's poems, and also features five original cover designs by area artists.  Each hand-stitched cover presents a visual interpretation of Kennedy's poems and provides an additional creative element to the book. 

"Beautiful and moving, Terry L. Kennedy's debut poetry collection describes an elusive and haunting narrative of loss, love, and recovery. His prose poems bring us so close to the narrator that we share in our bones his predicament of wanting to go forward while fearing what may be ahead. 'It's neither the end nor the beginning of all we hope for,' he discovers. Lyricism and considered thought are here, and lines that strike sparks from these passionate poems" (Kelly Cherry, VA Poet Laureate Emerita).

“The bright, swiftly kinetic surfaces of Terry Kennedy’s poems whisper as they pass a wistful but passionate love story. He has an Impressionist’s purpose and deftness of touch. I think of Renoir, of the etudes of Debussy. Yet his strophes stand firmly on their ground and are as strong as the seasons they portray. His every image bears the nuances of a remembrance. New River Breakdown is a rare treasure" (Fred Chappell, winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry).

"Prepare to be haunted by the poems... their shifting imagery, tones, and shadings. Prepare to be mystified by how these poems flow so effortlessly beyond the description of 'prose poem' into a genre that defies any label whatsoever, poems that eddy into dreamtime" (Kathryn Stripling Byer, NC Poet Laureate Emerita).

"Not only is [the collection] a stellar volume of prose poems, but it’s also a canny primer on that genre—a many-headed, oft-misunderstood hybrid. [Kennedy's] querulous, introspective speaker resists his own breakdown by breaking down his universe into parcels of incremental wonder in which “fear and love [are] one and the same.” The result is poem after poem of fabulous imagery and infinite possibility" (Joseph Bathanti, NC Poet Laureate).

 

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