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Richard Kenney is a poet whose technical skill, emotional depth, and intellectual resonance are showcased in his five books of poems: The One-Strand River: Poems 1994–2007; The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize; Orrey; The Invention of the Zero, and Terminator (Knopf, 2019). A recipient of the Lannan Literary Prize, Kenney serves as the Grace M. Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington.

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Easter Wings

by Richard Kenney
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Where else but Airport
Security, coffee-deprived, bored?

Under Hermes,
my graduate students assure me


poetry is characterized—
terrorized,


one might say—by what they menacingly
call semantic indeterminacy,


or instability, or contingency,
or chance.


Usually they call it disjuncture.
Unsure


of what they mean exactly, I prove it,
removing


my shoes.
What shows


on the full-body scan—
no wish to imagine.
People on couch
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