Kerry Shawn Keys
Perfectbound paperback, ISBN:  978-0-9772524-9-7, 92 pgs., $14.95

Currently Out of Print

Avant-garde, boom-generation poet, translator & international multi-media artist Kerry Shawn Keys presents a new volume of his surrealistic poetry. Confronting the world, as well as its strange manifestations, is a popular theme for creators of the baby boom period. This speaks of understanding and a new perspective on understanding the world: its various aspects and the desire for coexistence, or, on the contrary, to separate oneself from the phenomena popular in society. Therefore, this poet is an example of an avant-garde response to the above, for a more detailed analysis of the period and the phenomenon of the "post-war baby boom" you can read on many resources, or buy term papers online. His poems are imagistic, lyrical vehicles that express Keys’ personal observations of the natural world, contrasted to the artificiality of man’s world.  Keys’ work has been praised by Pulitzer Prize winners Gary Snyder & Gerald Stern, among others, as innovative & musical.  As a member of the post-war baby boom generation of poets, his approach is that of a deconstructionist, dancing to the inner music of a post-post modern sensibility.  An entertaining, thought-provoking read.

“Not only a poet of the mind, but a wisdom poet and allegorist.  Keys is a nature poet both in his closeness to and his terrific knowledge of the things of the natural world, and in his deliberate and absurdist anthropomorphization of those things.  A kind of deconstructionist, a scholar, and existentialist…and all of them with great passion – singing…and humming to his own carefree energy.”            -Gerald Stern

“Good word-slinging – rich sense of music, metaphor, image, melody – color and flavor…”                                    -Gary Snyder

“The body of Kerry Shawn Keys’ true subject in “The Burning Mirror” is the expanse of the history of the planet and the history of philosophy and poetry; granted to us in notes of the sublime and real shards of a very real world.  From fate gambler to devout shapeshifter to archeologist of the word and ethnoclast, the organizing psyche in these poems never loses sight of his main shamanistic and psychosexual thinking body, an organism that is equal parts god killer and worshipper…indeed, ‘St. Paul and Venus polished into one body by the sea’.”                       -Sam Witt

“…the work seems to exude like sap from a sugar maple or ants from a hill.  What an incredible wealth.  The sort of poet people dream about when they dream about poets.”                                  -Robert Bringhurst