The Migraine Hotel

A combination of verse and prose poetry, The Migraine Hotel is Luke Kennards third collection and very much a sequel to The Harbour Beyond the Movie. The voices continue to explore the territory opened up by Harbour, at once satiric, stricken, sincere and bitingly sarcastic, combined with a kaleidoscopic range of ways of engaging with a poem as a reader. The prose poems are prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire, which is to say they read more like grouchy comic monologues with unreliable narrators than prose-verse characterised by excessive lyricism.