Sudden Prose Reprints: "With the Boy, in the Box" by Jennifer Kronovet

With the Boy, in the Box

I drag the boy along the shore in a box, a boy-box, a not-box. I pause to speech-draft us a word-ship, a ship-box, a ship, and I try to leave spaces for weather, we-weather. I leave spaces that are high, highly visible for us to move into as we grow culture with our box-myth: a box can be a word can be a ship can be the blank that takes us to each other.

Jennifer Kronovet
Case Study: With (above/ground, 2015)



Information about how to purchase the chapbook directly from the publisher ($6 CAD for out-of-Canada orders, including shipping) are available here. 

Sudden Prose Reprints: "With the Boy, Inside the Museum" by Jennifer Kronovet

With the Boy, Inside the Museum

A painting of horses charging in a war. The war is subtle but the horses aren’t. Nouns, for the boy, live in the sounds nouns make. We don’t hear the horses, but the boy makes us. Our war is silent as horseflesh armoring distance. The boy’s future war makes a sound. We imitate that sound by accident.

Jennifer Kronovet

Case Study: With (above/ground, 2015)

Information on purchasing the chapbook directly from the publisher ($6 CAD outside of Canada) are available here. 

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Father Tongue" by Jennifer Kronovet

Father Tongue

Each issue of Blade Magazine describes a man and how he came to be a person of knives. There are veins of metal in rock and in a family and in one person’s diorama. Some is mined for weaponry, some for language. Some knives are photographed like ladies in a nudy magazine, hovering above place without a human to hold them. Their blades are reflectionless like the back of my mind when I look. Blade at the dining room table, in the bathroom, on the couch, throughout my striated landscape leading to leaving.

The language of knives includes: quenching, hilt, damascus, hollow ground, skeleton handle, balisong. “Song of Myself” has: loveroot, souse, killing-clothes, chant of dilation, fallen architecture. Whitman was too late to sow me as an orchard for harvesting the hybrid fruits of our thinking. I had held my father’s knives and could feel how they fit him, and he was multitudes to me by being different from himself. Whitman was merely me, but different. I am still waiting for my mind to fit a language the way a knife can fit my hand. I want to wield both together to cut my past down, the opposite of screaming.

Jennifer Kronovet

Case Study: With (above/ground, 2015)

Information on purchasing Case Study: With directly from the publisher ($6 CAD for out-of-Canada orders) is here. 

Sudden Prose Reprints: Jennifer Kronovet's "With the Boy, Outside"

I was very impressed with Jennifer Kronovet's chapbook, Case Study: With: this is the first of four prose poems I'll be reprinting. Thanks to Jennifer for permission and to her publisher, rob mclennan, for bringing her work to my attention.





With the Boy, Outside

Twigs collect by the side of the path. Wild flowers space themselves. Pigeons respond instantly to being chased. If I look through the boy—to loss, to a future, to else—nothing is enough to hold the ground into one place. This is your foot, I say. But people don’t talk like that. I watch people gather their faces into thoughts I can’t hear. This is the space between us, I say waving my hands to make the distance.

Jennifer Kronovet

Case Study: With (above/ground, 2015)

Information on how to purchase the chapbook directly from the publisher ($4 and $2 for out-of-Canada postage) can be found here.