The Sissies: A Launch with Bruce Boone and Evan Kennedy

Come help Evan Kennedy and Futurepoem launch Evan's book of poems, The Sissies. There will be readings by Evan and Bruce Boone. When: Saturday, June 18. 5pm. Reading probably closer to 5:30. Where: Alley Cat Books / 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Terra Firmament (Krupskaya) and Us Them Poems (BookThug). Bruce Boone is the author of Century of Clouds, My Walk with Bob, The Truth about Ted, and La Fontaine (in collaboration with Robert Glück) as well as numerous stories, essays, and poems. He has also translated works by Georges Bataille, Pascale Quignard, and Jean François Lyotard. He lives in San Francisco and is considered one of the founding authors of the “New Narrative” movement. Info on THE SISSIES: http://www.futurepoem.com/books/the_sissies "Composed on bicycular excursions through San Francisco, Evan Kennedy’s The Sissies aims to ‘be subjugated’ and speak as animal—wolf, ox, sheep, donkey. A ballpark seagull settling on the Giants’ outfield. The casual, mannered pun on St. Francis of Assisi (patron saint of the city and of animals) and ‘a sissy’ undergirds Kennedy’s argument against the ‘crummy superiority’ of humans, and for the ‘dissolution of animal taxonomy.’ The speaker strives toward, but does not reach, a creaturely transfiguration: ‘when I say wolf I mean something else I want to reach,’ a horizon continually vanishing. Amid echoes of the medieval argument against homosexuality as ‘contrary to kynde’ or against nature, Kennedy suggests that our species-exclusivity (homo, human) is our apparent peril—‘we have only kept identical to ourselves.’ Like the troubadour’s desire for another’s spouse, by definition unobtainable, or the longing for one’s creator and that-other-shore, these poems bray and graze toward a fuller empathy with creatures, a beatific meekness in the face of queer-bashing, where the body can be ‘stilled as meat.’" — Julian Talamantez Brolaski "The Sissies sings the body stigmatic (pummeled, benevolent, maligned) though it knows better than to hold out for unearthly transcendence. As a peer, I am envious and relieved to read poetry that is bare-chested, electric, and rare in its merger of poetic intuition with rigorous thought. ‘Let me speak as no one’s captive,’ Kennedy writes, unfettered by trend or pretense. This book makes me believe in our vocation again." — Corrine Fitzpatrick "The triple body of the text, like any sanctified uni-trinity worthy the name, ‘perform[s] a superhuman etiquette toward the rest of creation.’ Here the trinity is queer/poet/urban cyclist whose body speeds with nervy fragility across cityscapes of bursting apotheosis. The body and its relinquishment, never-ending sources of mystical wonder, occasion subjective transcendence according to a cyclical template: that of the praise song, especially St. Francis of Assisi’s famous prayer, paying pan-theistic tribute to all elements of creation, from the cockroach to the dog-masked boys that litter the uni-trinity of his life, which, like his body, his mind and his text, are an exhilarating eco-system, a linguistic ‘wildlife sanctuary.’" — Maria Damon