Metamorphoses: City Lights Spotlight No. 22

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Poetry Books for Spring 2023

A pagan elegy for the U.S., superimposing ancient Rome over San Francisco, Evan Kennedy's Metamorphoses seeks affirmation in change.

"Think of him as a circus Beckett or a Beckett circus or an early Dylan of the early twenty-first century. Think of the pleasure of language as it rises and as it ebbs. Think that you know what to expect and you will be surprised. Meet the author. Evan Kennedy. Say it again. Evan Kennedy. He is The One."--Lisa Jarnot, author of A Princess Magic Presto Spell

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 and the other in contemporary San Francisco, acknowledging the "transformations of this city [he] loves" into "awful condos of steel and glass" alongside Victorian homes. The poet shores up fragments against this cultural decadence through the cultivation of a wry pagan mysticism, whether he's offering devotions to Attis and Apollo, banishing Madonna from his pantheon, or placing twink emperor and notorious prankster Elagabalus in the East Bay. The book's transformations even extend to its central conceit, as Kafka bursts into the proceedings to dispute Ovid's claim to the laurel.