Sometimesa simulationof rain, sometimesa dimmetallic backlashof whatyou could callyour memoryif somethinglike thatcould be said to existin this barn.Our projects and dayswere eatenby the mothsfluttering in circlesof art over us.The barn is as emptyas a bundleof arrows.The projectI’m toldisn’t realnever was,and the ice crystalsand garbageand pink slipsand time capsulesare strewn in heapsagainstthe horizon,in bulgesof sex,in cages,in cedar forests.There is no stopto the dripping.Bye workers, bye patterns.Bye spitof the supervisorthat fliesthrough the windlike blue commas.There is no needfor the barn,we are so advancedin weather and war.
Tunnel, V
Kevin Holden
Feature Date
- December 31, 2023
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“Tunnel, V” from PINK NOISE: by Kevin Holden.
Published by Nightboat Books on April 18, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Holden.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Kevin Holden is the author of seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including Pink Noise, recently out from Nightboat Books, Solar, which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Birch, which won the Ahsahta Press Award. His work has appeared in publications such as Conjunctions, Lana Turner, and The New Yorker, and his translation of Jean Daive’s The Figure Outward is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. He is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
"Pink Noise is delightfully attuned to the living complexity of language, an experience that Holden renders as both conceptual and tactile."
—Michael Martin Shea, Colorado Review
"In Pink Noise, sometimes like a crackling icicle you see a glimmer of diamond dust, pink by nature. Here, in this book of poems. The lines are electric, conveying a new kind of sensuality, all quick and zapped. An on-coming fusion of poetic thinking with the sciences. Exciting! What we’ve been waiting for."
—Fanny Howe
"These poems are flecked with quartz and risk, love and dejection, pink and blood-red ecstatic brooding. Kevin’s line redirects consciousness to the magic of forgotten minutia and overlooked associative deliverance 'from cypress to pine before / fierce queen on a blank stage.' His language sets that stage for a tenderness that is in no way meek, for a sense of divinity found where life is. His is one of the voices that sets the bar for what poetry can do in this world."
—Harmony Holiday
"A queer lyric—like a queer body—holds within itself culture’s dueling impulses. In Kevin Holden’s singular poetics, libido’s lavish disordering resists rationality’s drive toward 'the war and reality / of our clear / civilization.' What results is a “rose tone row,” a nonce musical system he calls Pink Noise. Here queer experience sings alongside angular, abstract phrases sampled from math and science. Beautifully resisting conventional beauty, Holden makes atonal music whose fine phrasing 'glints, glitters, shines, shimmers, glows.'"
—Brian Teare
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