spuytenduyvil

Michael Keenan is a reborn troubadour…I always thought his poems silvery and charitable…I admire their lateral drift, their intimate evocation of names, their evanescence.

      C.D. Wright

 

In Michael Keenan’s haunted writing, death and Eros melt together in gorgeous swirls of witchlight. Here the Gothic imagination, ably reinvented by Keenan, wanders like a somnambulist through the white spaces of a Mallarméan night-wreck of words.

      Andrew Joron

 

I am in awe of these poems and their reverberation, contemplation, and conviction; I am in awe of their collapsibility. For Night is a book whose ruminations create space via echo and mirroring—“this / room as each / other / room / forms a needle an anchor a room”—all boundaries porous and broadening.

      Caryl Pagel

 

Like strategically placed paint these poems of Michael Keenan accrue as seeming particulates, that gather then simultaneously fuse into a field of darkened verbal repose.

      Will Alexander

 

Something softly ominous lurks in the pages of Michael Keenan’s For Night, a most gorgeous spell of a book—comprised of Eros and music, unidentified birdsong, unraveling hem. Through gesture and wisp, enacted mostly at dusk, the beautiful secrets accrete.

      Louise Mathias