Education
Connolly graduated from York University in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors and currently resides in Toronto with his partner, Canadian writer Gil Adamson.
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book
Happyland
( Love, death, and high school hit squads. Happyland, Kev...)
Love, death, and high school hit squads. Happyland, Kevin Connolly's eagerly anticipated second poetry collection, offers a fresh, contemporary approach to two age-old poetic preoccupations — love and death. In tumbling, energetic lines and vivid, visual language, these poems explore the shadows of the old century before training their hopeful but apprehensive attention on the darkening momentum of the new. Connolly fears neither eccentric humour nor high seriousness, and Happyland concusses with a sometimes whimsical, sometimes nasty flood of personal, cultural, and social pornography: doomed submarines, high school hit squads, cow-dung ozone holes, cat-skinners disguised as art students, firemen dressed in flames.… In Happyland, even our transparent, trivial entertainments (like politics and poetry) push us deeper into the semaphore of history. Like it or not, we're all players, the game's rigged, and it always comes down to the same sad business of sorting the drowned from the saved. There's no sitting out a round — either we choose the world, or it chooses us: "It's midnight on the moon, stars / mutter their familiar cautions, / the leaves misread the cue cards, / strange words wander the freeway like mice." "This is poetry contra poetry, a largesse of language about diminishing returns. Connolly's work sells you a ticket for the stand-up act and leaves you in your seat for the end of the world." — Michael Redhill
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1550225146/?tag=2022091-20
Kevin Connolly
Edit ProfileCareer
Connolly has served as an editor for presses such as ECW Press, House of Anansi Press and Coach House Press. After leaving York University, Connolly co-founded what! magazine with fellow York graduate, Jason Sherman. What! magazine published from 1985 to 1993 and was considered highly influential.
Connolly incorporates the strategies and technique of language poetry in his work and his poetry has appeared in a number of small presses, including The Monika Schnarre story and Deathcake.
In 1998, Eye weekly (a Toronto Star newspaper based division) hired Connolly to write columns on poetry, food and theatre but by 2004 he left to start working as an editor for Coach House press Connolly has helped educate many Canadians on poetry writing through workshops and educational competitions that focus on the process of poetry writing.
During the 1990s, Connolly helped further the careers of Canadian writers by publishing the early work of Canadians such as Lynn Crosbie, Gary Barwin, Daniel Jones, Stuart Ross and Gil Adamson, in a collection titled pinkdog chapbook. He served as a poetry judge at the 2006 great Canadian literary hunt and his poem, titled Sundial, was featured in the 40th anniversary edition of This Magazine.
His poem, titled Chain, from the 2005 Drift collection was included in a collection of works titled 30 in 30, a collection created to celebrate National Poetry Month.
Works
book
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Happyland
( Love, death, and high school hit squads. Happyland, Kev...)
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Happyland
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Born
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Nationality
Canada
Awards
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Gerald Lampert Award; Griffin Poetry Prize
The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award.; The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is made annually by the League of Canadian Poets to the best volume of poetry published by a first-time poet.The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award.; The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is made annually by the League of Canadian Poets to the best volume of poetry published by a first-time poet.