The Journal of Dead Nuns

Kevin Redlake

First off, I won't say this is an ironclad rule. But I'd bet a week's pay that any book of poetry containing the line “Conceptions starve in a penis of straw” is going to be crap. I think that after you found a hundred of them, I'd have come out far ahead of whoever was booking the bets.

Kevin Redlake won what may be the shortest-lives and most useless poetry award ever, the Jeffers and Blake Literary Art Award, for this slim (twenty-page) volume. Why this is I have no idea, because what's in it is painfully bad. More disturbing is that long-lived and somewhat respected journals like Spider Eyes and Starsong were willing to publish it before it appeared here, but that is another matter.

It's quite impossible to list everything wrong with the poems in Journal of Dead Nuns. Easier to say what's right about them: nothing. Redlake has no concept of concreteness, no ear for word choice, only the most basic four-on-the-floor techno ear for rhythm, and least of all any idea of how to take a merely shocking image and make it into something that might be considered food for thought.

Perhaps the most amusing bit about this is that the publisher wanted to sell this (did I mention twenty-page?) book for fifteen dollars. And this was 1992, back when Exact Change Press was publishing their extravagant editions for $8.95. Does anyone wonder why this press went under like a lead-filled herring?