The Migraine Hotel

Synopsis

A combination of verse and prose poetry, ‘The Migraine Hotel’ is Luke Kennard’s 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.

Reviews of this Book

‘Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.’ —Nick Laird

‘There is a considerable intelligence and stylishness in his wry domestication of the beautiful swerves and non-sequiturs of Ashbery's poems, plus a high degree of overt self-consciousness: several poems discuss and undermine their own procedures, or disarm potential criticism. Their main charm, though, is that they are – with their engagingly downbeat, faux-naïve narrators – genuinely funny.’ —Robert Potts

‘Hailed as a witty wunderkind in the poetry world, 26-year-old Kennard starts with contemporary cultural slickness and moves brilliantly into the surreal. Truly, a poet to watch’ —Christina Patterson

‘The Migraine Hotel, by Luke Kennard (Salt): Luke Kennard's The Harbour Beyond the Movie was that rare commodity: a poetry collection both excellent and laugh-out-loud funny. His latest offering – in which he considers heartbreak, despair and the pleasures of schadenfreude via his own sui generis brand of didactic humour – doesn't disappoint. Fans will be delighted by the return of Wolf, who this time ventures into the fields of psychotherapy and national identity ("'Fortunately my mother was Opus Dei and my father a Methodist,' says the wolf. 'Thus, on Tuesdays, I am Catholic in the mornings and Protestant in the afternoons'").’ —Sarah Crown