KEVIN PILKINGTON
THE BOOKS
Playing Poker With Tennessee Williams
ISBN-978-1-62557-834-1
"There is a comfortable, highly intelligent oddness on these pages, page after page of conciousness-changing images and moments of such vulnerability that you'll forget you're reading and find you want to reach out and comfort the speaker. Buy this book - it will repay you with so many marvelings you will go right back to the first page when you finish the last. This is a brilliant work."
-- Renee Ashley
Summer Shares
ISBN-978-1-5950723-9-9
This satiric novel grapples with the social and sexual issues that confront the lives of a group of young New Yorkers who share a beach house in The Hamptons from Memorial Day to Labor Day. All their passionate and, often times, humorous dramas are staged on the beaches, at the parties, and at the "hot spots" of The Hamptons.
The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree
ISBN-978-0-9826364-6-6
These are Manhattan poems, down-and-out poems, looking-for-a-job poems, regarding the world from a street corner poems.
"It's thrilling to watch a poet create a world - fascinating when it turns out to be the world we live in. Pilkington's spare, subversive voice can conjure love from a donut, despair. Reading this beautiful and quietly visceral book, it's easy to forget each of us lives only once and dies alone."
-- Dennis Nurske, author of The Border Kingdom
In the Eyes of a Dog
ISBN-978-1-935520-09-2
Pilkington takes the reader on a vivid explorative journey. It is a journey that begins in New York City where he lives and where he distills its concrete landscape with an insightful, unexpected use of language and imagery. Each poem in the collection is a discovery transforming the familiar into an individual, unique experience. These poems are personal confrontations with the world and the ultimate inner discovery of what it means to be human.
Ready to Eat the Sky
ISBN-1-57966-014-2
"In Ready to Eat the Sky the reader encounters a poet of extraordinary fineness of vision, one whose language adheres to the surface of realities with an elegance and simplicity rare in today's poetry. There is humility and grace of being in these poems, which stand before the world openmouthed, hat in hand, heart on sleeve. I take guilty pleasure in the poems of Kevin Pilkington, and consider him an essential voice in contemporary poetry."
-- Jay Parini, author of Why Poetry Matters
Spare Change
ISBN-0-931721-14-8
"Pilkington is unafraid of direct emotion in his poems - his speaker is always open and vulnerable. But because his rhythms and tropes are so vivid the poems never cross the line from true sentiment into mere sentimentality. This is a poet unafraid of being understood, who will not hide behind decorativeness or the oblique. Read these poems aloud and you will hear an authentic and quintessentially American voice not only writing but also speaking to you."
-- Thomas Lux, author of God Particles