The Sound Called The Wings of the Body

A dazzling constellation of poetic thinking about aesthetics, colonialisms, and popular culture, Jake Kennedy’s The Sound Called The Wings of the Body honours art, poetry, and land as a source of healing, wonder, and magic. A decade in the making, these poems glimpse moments of hope and awe, responding to the “works and days” of artists such as Douglas Cardinal, Masaki Kobayashi, Agnes Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Lent, and Sheila Watson, among many others. The poems also try to listen: to artists, to elders, to animal others, and to the land, particularly the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. Alive to colonial and class realities while also existing in relation to both an absurdist tradition that dismantles and a lyrical tradition that slices to the core of things, this collection brings a measure of optimism in our too-often vicious times. With an impressive range of tone, form, and structure, this poetry creates that “holy moly!” effect.