This book will hold you spellbound by the sheer display of darkness and truth the poet has brought into flames. – Adedayo Agarau
Robert’s exquisite book, Audacity Of Form, is a stunning, complex combination of poetry and visual art by Robert, with additional images by Canadian visual artist Cathy Daley and New Orleans based-photographer Julia Skop. The work developed out of conversations between Robert and Julia during the time period when Julia’s sister, a New Orleans dancer, Sara, was dying and Robert was grieving the death of his mother. The work is a series of linked poetic fragments and intuitive juxtapositions organized into two suites, “Music in the Audacity of Form” and “Sara Suite #116”. The pieces cover a wealth of themes and ideas including intersections of illness, the Katrina flood, hope, family histories, caregiving, homelessness, love & music. We are honoured to offer it now in a limited edition from Ice Floe Press.
An excerpt from Audacity of Form:
What of these cities – to allow someone to hurt you, cut
you remove part of you: at the hospitals you float below the waterline in
a dance a questioning of God a marathon of endurance. To note: the emergency
in your eyes are like the flashing siren – lights – forming a circle made of stones on
muddy fields with satellite dishes and graveyards –
when you stop here, you, Read All The (Red)lined, lines
Advanced Praise
Through a cacophony of images… Joyous and melancholic at once, Robert Frede Kenter both celebrates and mourns places and people that are no longer here yet ever present. – –Lizzie Olesker (script & co-director, The Washing Society, a hybrid documentary, NYC.
Robert Frede Kenter is unafraid to tackle the grit and the hardships of life. This mixed media collection of experimental poetry, visual art and photography offers hard truths and a voice for poetry and art lovers alike. —Isabelle Kenyon, founding editor of Fly On The Wall Press.
The works here, half rain and half ritual, ache with each weighty movement. – Aaron Tucker (author of Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp, and other works).
A Review by Adedayo Agarau
Audacity of Form reviewed by Adedayo Agarau.
Available Now!
USD$12 plus USD$4 shipping in the US:
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Robert Frede Kenter is the publisher, midwife and professor emeritus of Ice Floe Press in its various incarnations. A poet, playwright, essayist, editor, collaborator, generator of hybrid texts, and visual artist who loves to manipulate photo-based images and produce obtuse drawings, Robert has traveled extensively, survived chronic illness, disappeared into ghost worlds and healed from acute accidents. Poetry and art have been widely published both online and in print journals including writ, ARC, New Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, paragraph, Burning House Press, cough, grain, Going Down Swinging, Cypress, Anthropocene, Black Bough. In July 2019, Robert was the guest editor of Burning House Press (U.K) developing and curating BHP’s “secrets and lies” theme issue.
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