MADRIGAL
Think thoughts of language as healing.
Magical deer (madrigal) rooted in presence.
Waking
from sleep, antlers adorned sacred (the abject,
arising from the dead / dread) risen to overcome
a welcome to the (world’s clique of corrupt
kings). Think thoughts of language as healing.
Where the forest greets the cold.
In winter frost, dog lilies lie incubating,
dormant in shells of moths, destined to hatch infernal wings,
night moons flashing around themselves, old dry leaders
on the surface of the Moon. Vacuum-sealed, shed skin on
rockface, you bring a gift of feral bounty from inside wailing
boundaries, an armature through the air of burning trees.
Of leave takings, arrivals, legion. Congregate lexical
immediacy, hybridity, survival, investigations into
heritages of light, portents, heraldic symbol
sequences, image systems, new consequentialist
arrangements.
And the tree said its ok touch me electric sadness at its core
burned into my fingertips like a weeping lover parched brittle,
serious in its woundedness, defiant, in a convex glove
of the earth, a tilt, at the edge of the lake, the promontory
above
Author Statement
I created the hybrid image-text work Madrigal while Vikki C. and I were working on developing the themes and approaches for the series which came to be titled: PROCESS /MARGINALIA/ OTHERWOR(L)(D)S, which has been running at Ice Floe Press since January 2026. I am very pleased with the resulting series, which has captured in innumerable ways our intention to explore as many facets of the intersections of how we work, why, what we include, leave out, backgrounds and foregrounds, the contexts of alienation – inclusion – becoming and exploration of self/other, the social & earth histories and processes; all that concerns us and at the same time has its own expressive lineage and operations. Madrigal was composed furiously, slowly, in the forest retreat I am very honored to be able to visit to work; it embodies the ‘life’ around me while there, whether the deer that move through the woods, the occasional foxes, the ravens that follow me, the red squirrels incessantly gathering twigs, pine cones; the porcupine gnawing particle board, the weave of trees, water, plants, detritus, fungi, the mottled path of leaves, the fallen and the emergent. I see this work as prayer, possibility, meditation, witness to ecological and personal fragility. – Robert Frede Kenter
Madrigal (pdf version) (c) 2026 Robert Frede Kenter
BIO: Robert Frede Kenter was born in Hamilton, Ontario (the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas). Hamilton is an industrial city on a bay, notable for pollution, folk and blues, draft dodgers, lounge jazz and a guitar-based punk and metal scene. Robert subsequently lived in many locations from NYC to L.A. to London UK. Robert is co-curator of PROCESS/MARGINALIA/OTHERWOR(L)(D)S project. A widely published writer, visual artist, performer, & publisher of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net) recently work in: Sedserio, Petrichor, Watch Your Head, Harpy Hybrid, ballast, winged moon, ABR, storms journal, heavy feathers, Cable Street, Burning House, Pissoir, Lost & Found Times, Blood & Honey, Otoliths, Paragraph, the Prose Poem Journal. Anthologies incl: Capitalism is a Death Cult (Sunday Mornings), Speaking in Tongues (Steel Incisors), The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press), Glisk and Glimmer (Sidhe Press). Selectbooks: Moon Writing (with Catherine Graham) (Ice Floe Press, 2026), In the Blueprint of Her Iris (with Vikki C) (Ice Floe Press, 2025), Father Tectonic (Ethel Zine, 2025), Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Robert was a feature reader at Cheltenham Poetry Festival, (2020), guest edited Burning House Press, July (2019), & was finalist for the Da Vinci Eye Prize for book design at Eric Hoffer Awards (2023). Soc media X: @frede_kenter, IG: icefloe22, r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, Bluesky: @rfredekenter.bsky.social.
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