Jake Kennedy is a poet, prose writer, and teacher. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies. His chapbook, Hazard, is published by BookThug. Jake currently teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College.

Winner of the 2010 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, The Lateral is a highly original and experimental book from a nimble poetic mind. It includes an elegiac found-long-poem that gathers all the “Acker” keyword tags from the Flickr database and reapplies them as words-of-lament for the revolutionary artist-writer Kathy Acker (1947-97), a series of prose-poem-ruminations that contemplate the optimal conditions for the poetry, and a section of poems that can only be described as the vulgar, unkempt cousin of Hugh Prather’s Notes to Myself.

 “Not only does Acker’s legacy lead Kennedy to produce more writing (art begets art, of course), but, after traversing through this landscape of visual imagery, his words lead the reader back to the real world.” — Broken Pencil

kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s visual poetry has appeared in the anthology Boredom Fighters (Tightrope Books) and in such magazines as dandelion and filling Station. A winner of the Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook Award, he studied English literature at the University of Calgary. He recently traded his life for a house in Armstrong, British Columbia, and a job teaching literature at Okanagan College.

Reading is slow, and writing is slower. Words are old-fashioned. Why not consider the communication of the future? In 1837, Sir Isaac Pitman began a sixty-year obsession with producing a system of Shorthand that accurately and swiftly captures voice as evidence of the mind’s movements. In the 1950s, John Malone developed Unifon, a forty-character phonetic alphabet intended for international communication by the airline industry. Both projects reached for artful utility, and both have largely been forgotten.

In Rhapsodomancy, kevin mcpherson eckhoff remembers them. Exploring these two phonic alphabets as image, these poems playfully interrogate the relationship between voice and visual poetry. Can pictures represent voice? Can unutterable writing express thought? Rhapsodomancy offers an imaginative response to such questions via empty suits reciting onomatopoeia, letters defying the laws of reality, and drawings divining the future.