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Publisher's Comments: This unique collection of ekphrastic poems continues Adele Kenny’s reflections on the spiritual condition of being. Despite loss and change, she looks into the dark without flinching and finds light among the shadows. Using ekphrasis as a rhetorical device and combined with Kenny’s signature elements of technical proficiency, hauntingly lucid imagery, and compelling immediacy, these poems filter and record experience in startling ways as they journey across aging’s inevitable arc. Hardwired by Kenny’s understanding of the human spirit, these poems offer us insights into the healing power of attention and awareness.
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- Paperback: 90 pages
- Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers, LLC
- Publication Date: December 5, 2019
- ISBN-10: 1566494052
- ISBN-13: 978-1566494052
- Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.2 x 9 inches
- 40 Ekphrastic Prose Poems Based on Paintings by Various Artists
- Descriptions of All Paintings
- A unique feature of the book is the inclusion QR codes for each of the paintings. Using their smart phones or mobile devices and a free QR code scanning application, readers can view the paintings while they are reading the poems.
Publisher's Comments: This unique collection of ekphrastic poems continues Adele Kenny’s reflections on the spiritual condition of being. Despite loss and change, she looks into the dark without flinching and finds light among the shadows. Using ekphrasis as a rhetorical device and combined with Kenny’s signature elements of technical proficiency, hauntingly lucid imagery, and compelling immediacy, these poems filter and record experience in startling ways as they journey across aging’s inevitable arc. Hardwired by Kenny’s understanding of the human spirit, these poems offer us insights into the healing power of attention and awareness.
Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist
A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All
Welcome Rain Publishers
ISBN: 9781566493963
Hardcover with Dust Jacket
80 Pages, 52 Prose Poems
$15.00
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"These poems venture deeply into that place where, “What never happened will never change.” It is that place where our past regrets, lost loved ones and former selves live on. But in Kenny’s vividly imagined poems it is not a haunted place. It is alive with the sounds of birds, wind, surf; filled with larkspur and moss, hawks, squirrels and crickets; the smell of mud, old houses, smoke and rain-drenched trees. In language so subtly pitched, paced and modulated it captures our attention without drawing attention to itself, Kenny draws us into discovering that what never changes is all around us in the ever-changing world, that one is only approachable, knowable, bearable through the other. We trust her to be our guide because her vision is so unwavering. She refuses to turn aside from anything she perceives, but this resolve hasn’t hardened her. To write or read such poems requires a deepening of empathy and compassion."
— Martin J. Farawell
Director, Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
Intensely focused, compressed, and sharp-edged, these prose poems by Adele Kenny take the spiritual journey into heightened awareness of experience, place, and identity. Deliberate fragments, the language of dreams, and an occasional nod to the surreal combine with Kenny’s signature elements of striking imagery and compelling immediacy to inform an enhanced vision of the ways in which the interior life intersects with the outside world. These poems startle, surprise, and tell us things about ourselves that we didn’t know.
—Welcome Rain Publishers
Hardwired by Kenny’s gift for dimension and her profound understanding of the human spirit, the poems in this collection show us the healing power of attention and awareness. Kenny’s words move associatively (and swiftly) through image and sound, and she makes a particular music that is uniquely her own. Impelled by lyrical precision, these poems cast light on what we are learning, and what we already know, about ourselves. This collection contemplates the ways in which the “interior life and the outside world intersect” and is a must-read for anyone interested in looking beneath the surface of things. In addition, through the process of these poems, Kenny leads us to see that, as C. S. Lewis wrote of the spiritual journey, '… there must be a real giving up of the self.'
—Alex Pinto, Tiferet, Spring 2015
Click Here to Read the Ploughshares Interview
Click Here to Read the Poets' Quarterly Interview
Click Here to Read the IthacaLit Review
Click Here to Read Lynn Domina's Review
| Review by Alex Pinto for Tiferet, Spring 2015 – Click on the Icon to Read |
What Matters
Welcome Rain Publishers
ISBN-10: 1566490790
ISBN-13: 978-1566490795
64 pages
47 Poems
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
$15.00
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Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Poetry
These poems are eloquent, candid, straightforward and genuine. (Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate 1997-2000)
[Adele's poems] intrigue and more. (Sir Christopher Ricks, British Literary Critic and Scholar, Oxford Professor of Poetry 2004-2009)
In Adele Kenny's finely wrought meditations on grief and loss, she never forgets that she's a maker of poems; in other words, that the poem in its entirety is more important than any one of its utterances, phrasings, or laments. What Matters straddles two of the exigencies of the human condition: diminishment and endurance. It abounds with poems that skillfully earn their sentiments. (Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry)
These are poems that come to (poetic) grips with the issues of grief, fear, and death … focused in a new and strong way. (Gerald Stern, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, National Book Award Recipient)
From the Dust Jacket Front Flap: We’re all survivors of one thing or another, and these meticulously crafted poems by Adele Kenny tell us that we’re not alone. Intimate rather than private, the poems in What Matters are characterized by startling imagery, rich metaphor, and a compelling sense of immediacy. The book begins with meditations on the past and what has been lost (as Shakespeare wrote, “…what’s past is prologue”). Section two moves through the diagnosis and treatment of a life-threatening illness, and section three demonstrates how loss, grief, and illness can teach us how to live. Intensely lyrical and sometimes edgy, these poems are about the human spirit’s transcendent nature—the immanent “something more.”
Reviews of What Matters
The Inner Music Review, Click Here
To view the following pdf files, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download free by clicking here. When the files open, if you only see the first page, place your cursor at the bottom of the page and look for a pop-up with four icons; click on the second icon from the right to view the entire file.
| adanna_review_of_what_maters_summer_2012.pdf |
| journal_of_new_jersey_poets_review_of_what_matters_may_2012.pdf |
| paterson_literary_review_review_of_what_matters_2012-2013.pdf |
| tiferet_journal_review_of_what_matters_2011.pdf |
| home_planet_news_review_of_wm.pdf |
The Kite & Other Poems from Childhood
Finishing Line Press
ISBN: 1-59924-370-9/
ISBN: 978-1-59924-370-2
Size 5" x 8"
Saddle Stitched
29 pages
Poems Written by Adele When She Was
Between the Ages of 4 & 10
$12.00
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Adele Kenny’s The Kite & Other Poems from Childhood is more than just surprising – it’s astonishing! “Look,” this little girl says, “how the leaves make / A doily in the sky”! She projects the word as a single bright star to wish upon – such hope and lucid vision! These poems are devout without being precious, poignant without being clichéd. Young Kenny demonstrates a startling wisdom – and a bright gift for articulating her world’s intricate newness.
(Renée Ashley, Author of The Revisionist’s Dream)
Adele Kenny’s sense of the lyrical phrase is impeccable. I know of no poet more dedicated to the perfectly crafted poem. Most importantly, I know of no other poet who achieves this perfection as often. It is a pleasure to see her first entering the language (before the age of ten!), and through that entrance, learning to give order to her world – purposefully, joyfully, with the full innocence of childhood. Her talent, careful love of language, and wonder at the natural world were present even then.
(Joe Weil, Author of What Remains)
Chosen Ghosts
Muse-Pie Press
ISBN: 0-918453-17-8
6" x 9" Perfect Bound
112 pages
67 Poems
$12.95
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It is seldom that a bard emerges among us, but Adele Kenny is one of these. Seldom have I known a poet or writer of any stripe to drag the soul over such rough shoals toward redemption. I offer gratitude and blessings to her and her glorious Irish/Hungarian forebears. (Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming and Singing My Him Song)
The poems in Chosen Ghosts are mystical, celebratory, powerful. They exalt experience in a spirit that recalls Blake, Yeats, and Eliot yet speak to us in a voice that is distinctively and hauntingly Adele Kenny's own. (William Maxwell, Novelist, Short Story Writer, 40-Year New Yorker Editor)
The poems in Chosen Ghosts are enlightened, graceful and giving, beautifully crafted. (Gerald Stern, 1998 National Book Award Winner)
Staffordshire Figures:
History in Earthenware 1740-1900
(with Veronica Moriarty)
Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0-7643-1917-5
8" x 11"
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
240 Pages
568 Color Photos & Sketches
$59.95
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Called "a milestone in Staffordshire literature" by Denise Sater, editor of Antiques & Auction News (Vol. 35, No. 4), Staffordshire Figures: History in Earthenware 1740-1900, co-authored by Adele Kenny and Veronica Moriarty, is available from Schiffer Publishing. This unique 2004 release is a meticulously researched volume that offers an in-depth look at the cultural, socio-economic, religious, political, and technological conditions that defined the subject matter of English Staffordshire figures made during the 18th and 19th centuries. Each chapter is a self-contained study of the potteries, the potters, and various categories of pre-Victorian and Victorian figures. This is an essential reference for inclusive and special category collectors, dealers, designers, historians, and curators. Books may be ordered through local booksellers, directly from Schiffer (610-593-1777) or through other booksellers via the Internet.
At The Edge of the Woods
Muse-Pie Press
ISBN: 0-918453-14-3
8" x 11"
Perfect Bound
170 pages
129 Haiku, Senryu, and Sequences
Out of Print, Limited Copies Available
$13.95
An Archaeology of Ruins
New Dimensions of the 80's Publishers
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 81-84091
5" x 8"
Perfect Bound
52 pages
26 Poems
$12.95
Out of Print, Limited Copies Available
Staffordshire Animals
Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0-7643-0422-4
8" x 11"
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
192 Pages
415 Photos & Illustrations
$49.95
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Photographic Cases
Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0-7643-1267-7
8" x 11"Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
176 Pages
454 Illustrations
$59.95
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Castles and Dragons
Muse-Pie Press
ISBN:0-918453-10-0
5" x 8"
Perfect Bound
110 Pages
90 Haiku and Senryu
Illustrated
Out of Print, Limited Copies Available
$12.95
Merit Book Award Winner, 1991
Starship Earth
Press Here
ISBN: 1-878798-01-4
5" x 8"
Saddle Stitched
22 Pages
47 Environmental Haiku
with Translations from "The Canticle of the Sun" by St. Francis of Assisi
$5.00
For ordering information,
email Press Here: [email protected]
Staffordshire Spaniels
Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0-7643-0216-7
8" x 11"
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
144 Pages
292 Photos & Illustrations
$39.95
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