here are some things i've been up to lately

books

Gravity's Angel

Poems about Simone Weil. Poems that remind me of Simone Weil, or that I might have sent to Simone Weil except she's dead, but I'm sending anyway because it's not too late. Who can be too late? Why is time an issue? Kingston University Press, 2023.

The collection establishes the French writer and political activist Simone Weil as its master trope and weaves through Plato, Ovid, Botticelli, Trotsky, Lewis Carroll, Artaud, Gertrude Stein, et al. with Weil as a guide to the geometric convergences of history. It is a fascinating meditation on, and at times a parody of, history, the kind of thing that rejuvenates poetry’s function in the world.

—Peter Michelson,

author of Pacific Plainsong

Available here.

Rhinoceros

Poems about animals. Poems about people eating and using tools. Poems about the accumulation of experience and placing that in the stream of life like a big fat wad. Not fatwa. Poems about religion animals. The various animal religions. Stories we tell each other around the fires of burning California. Poems about the stars. Cartoon animals caught in second thoughts. Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

With lyrical turns and metaphorical sways, Rhinoceros embodies mythologies that are brought down to earth, and one can feel the power of a masterful signifier.

—Yusef Komunyakaa

from the Introduction

Available here.

Inferno

A chapbook selection of Dante's Inferno, translated by K. Ducey. Mostly the first decalogue. All the way down into the dentist's office. Elvis and California, the funeral of Durruti and all of our best disaster metaphors for your delectation. Cannot Exist press, 2015.

Kevin Ducey partners with Dante to condemn and mourn contemporary complacencies, lies, and antidemocratic nonsense in elegant and hilarious cantos whose liberties of translation spring from a sensitive and impassioned connection with the critical concerns of the original.

—Andy Gricevich

Possibly available here.