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.