Asphalt Cigar

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

Kevin Connolly talks tough; his poems are streetwise, cynical, full of
pop-culture references. The talk turns glib rather easily, however. He
can write a very funny poem about contemporary pieties (“The New
Man” is a marvelous satire in six lines), but the book is padded with
three weak sets of poems (one about Columbus, whom he calls “Chris”
and places in a contemporary setting; a poorly focused satire titled
“A Super-model’s Story,” which wastes some fine opportunities for
social commentary; a set of trivial poems in caps called
“Biograffiti,” none of which is worth reading twice). The poems
rewriting and mangling Nietzsche’s life work well (it’s a shame he
wrote only five of them). The book often shows his grasp of the
essentials of craft (his retelling in words of the ending of Arthur
Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde demonstrates a rare skill at describing
physical action, but it also shows forced humor and an assumption that a
few forced surreal images can carry a poem). Connolly has been published
by some small presses and literary magazines; he needed a longer
apprenticeship before publishing a first book.