Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Mujaddara

I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere.
While I mess around with my kitchenware.from

 

‘Autumn Couplets’

Every time I review a new poetry collection, it feels like I am holding poetry itself to the light, discovering things about how poems might work, what they might deliver, what they might spark in a reader.

Erik Kennedy’s sublime new collection, Sick Power Trip, got me musing on how poetry might stand as a prism. A poem might be held to get a view, then swivelled to get a different view, and then another, and then again. Each time I turn a page in Sick Power Trip, it’s a prismatic surprise. Unexpected. Utterly fertile. I love it.

Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.

Even the pronouns, particularly the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are multi-tendrilled. The voice speaking is prismatic, drawing us into a stretching field of possibilities, vulnerabilities, recognitions. Nothing is set concrete here. I love this.

Let me shift the prism again for you, in a collection that reveals both the positives and negatives of situations, poetry that is mindful of an impulse to decipher, to muse upon sides, to navigate the good and the bad and the inbetween. There’s involvement and not involvement. Darkness and lightness splintering, merging, resisting clear borders.

And always, let me underline this, there is always the ripple of surprise, in turning each page, within the poem itself. I love this. For example, going shopping after illness:

I thought about the things that are abut me.

And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully realised lives,
doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.

 

from ‘Shop Floor Layout Algorithm’

Another stunning example, the notion (or experience) of consolation. Wit and wisdom again refracting. Self fragility and collective strength. The poet holds the prism poem along the degree to which one can understand what someone is going through. Here is the final stanza, it resonates so deeply:

That’s why I can picture it
but can’t imagine what it feels like
to be a phone,
delicately poised on the arm of a chair,
that gets one message too many
and vibrates onto the floor.

 

from ‘Consolations’ 73

I want to share so many of the poems in the book with you, so you too can experience the glorious settings. I like how a word or idea might pose like a mise en abyme – inside this thought (word) another thought (word), inside this light refracting, another light that surprises startles delights. Take the poem offering an analogy on thinking, poised on the moment in a fable when the thorn pulled from a lion’s paw turns out to be a little lion, and the whole progression and stability and expectation of thought or story is in jeopardy.

And then, most importantly, how to deliver and absorb the poem prism in a time when the world is so damn awry. I keep swearing I won’t mention this in a review, but it’s the monster in my kitchen. As I read, I pick up on how doing is in partnership with thinking, how in one poem protest might be deflating tyres of SVUs and in another poem caring might be hugging trees like a 70s hippy. Again the vital oscillation. I am thinking this. Writing poems might be a form of protesting, sharp insistent necessary protesting (listen to the three poems below), but it is also a form of caring. I love this. I love this so very much.

On multiple occasions, a single poem stalls (shadows?) me with its prismatic effects. Surprise turns alongside shards of wisdom alongside physical detail alongside acute global and local concern, with every effect housed within writing that is sublimely fluent. Read ‘How a Year Ends’ for example. This poem. This magnificent poem. Try this stanza:

A year is a road
that ends at the sea
in an afterthought of a town,
just a few weatherbeaten houses,
some indifferent trees,
a small picnic area,
and a one-eyed cat
wandering around proprietorially.
You drive here
because it is here.

 

from ‘How a Year Ends’

Maybe reading this collection is akin to a snow globe effect. Every time I hold a poem to the light and dark of my reading, and let the poetry shake and settle in my mind, I feel the sharp sweet delight of surprise and wonder. On the back of the book (always the last thing I read), it states “Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy and solidarity”. And that is exactly why I love this collection so very much. Let us put these words in our pockets and carry them over close the coming months: self-care, empathy, solidarity.

I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look
like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples
from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me.
I was loving them. I was setting them free.

 

from ‘Self-Affirming Mantra’ 

a reading

Erik reads: ‘Bildungsroman’, ‘I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself’ and ‘The $6 Pepper Song’

Erik Kennedy is the author of two previous books of poems, both with Te Herenga Waka University Press: the Ockham-shortlisted There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) and Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022). Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Cover design: Todd Atticus
Te Herenga Waka University Press page