Notes on The Sonnets

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021



Longlisted for the Rathbones folio prize



A Poetry Book society Recommendation

Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.

A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.

Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse.

'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.'

- Caroline Bird



Luke Kennard is the author of five collections of



poetry and three pamphlets. His second collection,

The Harbour Beyond the Movie, was shortlisted for



the 2007 Forward Prize for Best Collection and



his fifth, Cain, for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize.



He lectures in Creative Writing at the University



of Birmingham.



Joyously unclassifiable.

The Guardian



Kennard's book, this endless party talk, is as riddling and enjoyable as the old sonnets on which it riffs. Think of it as the ideal cabaret: it never coheres, it never wants to, and it'll never leave you at a loss for fun.



★★★★★The Telegraph



Consistently entertaining ... [Kennard's] most mature and emotionally vulnerable collection yet.

Tristram Fane Saunders, TLS



Family life, doubt and faith, society, people, writers, social commentary, dark matter and string theory, the world at large, are all covered at some pace, each poem containing laugh-aloud ideas but also deep and considered moments which sneak up and surprise you ... extraordinary and original.

Rupert Loydell, International Times



Notes on the Sonnets ... complicates history, truth and authority, all with wry wit, infectious humour and pronounced melancholia.

Kate Simpson, Poetry Review