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.

Joseph Kidney has published poems in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc, Vallum, The Malahat Review, Oberon, The Fiddlehead, Periodicities, The New Quarterly, PRISM, The Ex-Puritan, and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (in Arabic translation). He won the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2 for the best poem submitted by an author under 35. He was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Bedford International Poetry Award, Arc’s Poem of the Year (three times), The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and a Canadian National Magazine Award. Originally from BC, he is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. His chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea is available from Anstruther Press.

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Joseph Kidney’s Devotional Forensics announces a poet of delicate intellect, generous spirit, of vulnerability and a persuasive authority. Kidney seems to me a philosopher–poet doubling as “sentry guarding the ruin from repair.” Rather than fixing things, why not allow them to become what they will, and call that allowance a form of generosity, of understanding? For, “[n]o matter/how narrow the mesh of the net, things crumble free,/having earned the privilege of breaking,” which might be a good thing, says Kidney: don’t “some kinds of pain/perfect themselves into sweetness”? These poems contain plenty of sweetness, but there’s no naivete here; the camaraderie of friends, the dark and bright particulars of the natural world – none of these erase life’s other, more banal, troubling truths, for instance the 24-hour Walmart whose “stale bossa nova/cuts routinely to commercial for missing children.” The book’s all-inclusiveness reflects Kidney’s large-heartedness, made all the larger by his honesty: “I should promise to be kinder,” he says at one point, as if intention might have to be enough. One of the many gifts of Devotional Forensics is its affirmation that, in our brokenness, we are human, we are flawed, and we can be humane.

Carl Phillips, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020</i>