Ghost Town Street

Kenny Knight's fourth collection was written between 2020 and 2022, a time when ordinary towns frequently resembled ghost towns, the author's native Plymouth being no different from anywhere else in this regard. His surreal mix of deadpan narrative, skewed memory and keen observation - the latter made poignant by the great deterioration in the author's sight over recent years - is sui generis. For the reader, it's a delightful road to be on, and Kenny Knight the ideal travel companion.

Comments on the author's previous collection:

"This is a stunning collection. These long poems stay with me, like nothing since I read, by accident years ago, the poems of Jaroslav Seifert. They have a similar mixture of close intimacy and expansive mapping; at times they are tied to very specific places and yet they always exceed them, push at their edges, and at the edges of the people inside their lines; these are poems about travel and dreams of journeys never taken, of girlfriends never met, of the zone between parting and changing, loss and seeing anew."  -Phil Smith, International Times

"It's a fine line, isn't it, the 'I' in poetry informing or engaging or alienating the reader? Too much and there is a self-indulgence, obviously. I think Knight presents the perfect balance because there is in this collection its seamless thread of the apparently real and the delightfully imaginative refraction of this."  -Mike Ferguson, International Times

Cover: 'Prairie Ghost Town', Canada, copyright © ImagineGolf, 2013.