Kendra Sullivan’s delightful and always surprising writing in Reps is the sound of consciousness itself, a mind moving like clouds forming shapes, strange and familiar, impossible not to follow, until you find yourself blissfully shifted or altogether gone, released, floating, free. You are here: “A version of Earth that ignores its own suffering [...] called a map.” Deeply felt and followed through, the indispensable questions that preoccupy Sullivan are suspended in an ocean of empathy. Dazzling prose humming with human curiosity and desire carries us over ways/waves of knowing, real as the salt in the sea, daring us to swim. The story of all stories is here too, embodied in the poems, infinitely opening (doors onto doors). Philosophic inquiry relies equally on lived and unlived lives “to provide experience / about a dream being / complete in a way no / life is.” Unrelenting torrents of dizzying lyric heights, enchanting repetitions, and cascading narratives undercover poetry doing the real work, casting its curious spell deeper and wider, leaving little dew drops on your cheek. Simply put, this book is magic... if magic means rendering the impossible real—to move (the soul), to create (worlds), to change (the way we see, think, and imagine what’s possible). Poof! You are all alive.
Sampson Starkweather
The reps in Kendra Sullivan’s mesmerizing collection locate us in the taut and tender memory palaces between her particular life and all lives in real or possible relation, the secrets of which squirrels past and future have hidden in them, and which Sullivan recovers and reveals in her exquisite, generous Levertovian or Niedeckerian condensery. Her work is endless— there is no layoff from the grief or its fruits that become hers, "between heaven/and the tree/of heaven’s/impenetrable green canopy/pregnant/with squirrel/pageant./ It was mine!” How fortunate— to share and feel—it is ours.
Farnoosh Fathi
Sullivan is like catching an air current and riding it away from the ego-driven, individual-story obsessed tormented soul, and out into the field where everyone is already there, talking and dancing, crying and laughing, being loud and being quiet... and it's the right place to be. A book of profound generosity in which the poet's role is not to soliquize but rather to cast the net of language out into the larger community and find the collective stories that are there, residing in the larger consciousness, wanting to be spoken, shared, and read. This book is a tremendous gift and the antidote to loneliness.
K Prevallet
Reps is a bracing and riveting examination of our ecological crisis and each of our attempts to tread the treacherous waters of racial capitalism. Every word in the book is prismatic, distilling and casting an entire spectrum of repetitions and representations, and then questioning the literal and figurative technologies and logics necessary to reproduce each utterance. Along the way, Sullivan casts a reflexive, but never navel-gazing, eye on everything from linear depression to linear regression, from naval fleets to navel attachments to naval fictions. "Are stories in some way complicit in the creation of authority?" Sullivan asks. At stake is nothing less than the reproduction of human and more-than-human species and the sustainability of our planet. Her investigations are urgent and precise, for "while fertility has a sell-by date, reproductive labor is shelf stable. Time is not endless." Sullivan implicates each of us-- the sanitary engineer who "designs public waste removal mazes... and other obfuscations," the mapmaker, and the reader. "Celestial maps are meant to be held overhead when consulted. If you think you can look down at the stars you've got another thing coming." It is in this mode of care, with attention to standpoints, positionalities, and epistemologies, that Sullivan imagines anew. As she writes, "to splice the present to the past via deletion of certain narrative strands is to predicate different futures."
Celina Su
Whether or not aggregates of three still comprise some deeper part of our legacy of meaning, Kendra Sullivan’s triptych moves “in, around, and about” singular ways of knowing. In Exercises Against Empathy, the narrator feels both completely familiar—of our time and place—and as if from another era altogether, as if she’s come back to the present with other forms of knowledge, trying to describe things she’s never seen before. As shape shifting guide to our perplexity, Sullivan then moves through stories, as in “A story about,” before firmly landing on grief and mourning, perhaps our primary motive to inscribe. As trusty companion, Sullivan renders our vision fresh, covering and revealing the way, our movement in the world, all in one motion.
Ammiel Alcalay
Concentrated yet flowing, Kendra Sullivan’s scrupulously honed language turns storytelling into a redemptive exercise of clairvoyance. Her book, a remarkable cascade of dares, hypotheses, cubist statements, and lyric exclamations, has the pith of epitaph, the liveliness of cinéma-vérité, and the onrushing abundance of the roman-fleuve, a streaming prosody that begins again and again its push into a future made possible, made tangible, by testimony’s tender attentiveness to the weight of syllables. In Sullivan’s Reps, every sentence (whether matter-of-fact or dream-like) stages a love affair with a labyrinth it simultaneously escapes.
Wayne Koestenbaum
My experience of listening to Kendra Sullivan’s poems is akin to being repeatedly pulled inside-out as means of continuity and recomposure, while the poems articulate their own angles on what a picture plane made of words might be. The treatment of memory and grief as active, civic, expanding source in the searing long poem that ends the book is a major wakefulness inducer, a set of counterpoints suffused with humor and hope in the face of reality's so-called fabric.
Anselm Berrigan
