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 a 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 commercials 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 Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020
“There’s a reason for pouring salt in a wound,” writes Joseph Kidney. “It tastes so much better.” These are poems that employ the perfect amount of salt, each line revealing the flavours of the surface without obscuring its subjects. In fact, the world in this collection feels realer, more vivid, rendered in Kidney’s expert wit and music. An impressive debut, one to savour and reread. — Kayla Czaga, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award-winning author of Midway
Astonishing, painful, elegant. The dramatized crises in Devotional Forensics set terms for themselves nearly impossible to resolve, then go about picking their way toward that same precipice. The marriage here of precision image, riverine syntax, feeling, and music with what used to be called “quest,” or “struggle,” marks Joseph Kidney’s work out as arriving sui generis yet somehow also hauntingly familiar, as though we’d forgotten we were in this much trouble. — Ken Babstock, Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author of Swivelmount
Devotional forensics: to investigate, with almost scientific rigor, the sources of one’s own devotions. In conducting his dazzling investigations, Joseph Kidney spares no tool, from the deceptively quotidian—more than one poem treats the subject of trash — to the arcane — from Reformation theology to the rarer species of linguistic flora and fauna: puns, oxymorons, contranyms. Yet this honed wit and blade-sharp intelligence bely a wisdom born of suffering: “whenever you refine the edge of a blade, / you shave a sliver off.” Here is a poet who set out for the impossible and was rewarded by that “more total mastery on the other side / of control.” — Armen Davoudian, author of The Palace of Forty Pillars
Devotional Forensics presents us with something truly remarkable: the first, full flowering of a truly original poetic talent. Nothing and no-one sounds like Joseph Kidney. — The Miramichi Reader
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 Poem of the Year award from Arc, 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, 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.
