Xiphoid Process

Nine years in the making, award-winning poet Kevin Connollys new collection extends its authors investigation of identity, authority, intention, and authenticity. What is public poetry? In an age of tweets and trolls, what should it even try to be? Through revision, redaction, ventriloquism, homage, self-sabotage, and outright plunder, the poems in Connollys Xiphoid Process interrogate the alleged futility and alleged insight of mid-life. Are we who we are simply because wed otherwise be nothing? Or are we (more hopefully) something parked, for a time, in time, trying to make something useful out of the experience? Walt Whitman, Tom Petty, Alec Baldwin, Doug Stanhope, Journey, Judd Nelson, Billy Ripken, Johnny Weissmuller, Don Felder, Lindsay Lohan, Shiprock, NM, the police blotter at Point Reyes Station, California, and the moons of Saturn are all poised to make their case in the poets latest deliberations.