Devotional Forensics

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

With dazzling wit and brittle tenderness, multi-award-winning poet Joseph Kidney catches all in his highly anticipated debut collection. Kidney's rich, innovative imagery finds the durable in the contemporary and articulates a new vision of human vitality from inside a world that always seems on the verge of ending.

Channeling influences as wide as Shakespeare and Anne Carson, Virgil and John Ashbery, Devotional Forensics takes full advantage of the liberties of language, playing with its boundaries. This formally inventive collection exalts the ordinary and fleshes out the metaphysical, constructing theologies out of wildfires, classical music, and garbage collection, while engaging seamlessly with everything from renaissance literature to family intimacy, from modern art to biological science. At once timeless and urgent, Kidney's poems dance through all the miniature apocalypses that compose the evolution of time into history.