Books
Flynn is the author of five collections of poetry: The Talking Drum, The Book of Monsters, The Lost Sea, The Golden Ratio, and Colony Collapse Disorder, and one collection of essays, The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing.
Colony Collapse Disorder
Wings Press, 2013/ ISBN: 978-1-60940-294-5 Paperback $16
“The poems of Colony Collapse Disorder form a geopolitical abcedarium that lives up to Keith Flynn’s reputation as a seminal force in poetry . . . a voice for the dispossessed . . . with rock-gospel charisma and riddle-like revelations.” (Choice)
“Keith Flynn is a hinge-hipped healer, a blues growler, a soul surgeon, and a hungered kiss for the ears. His gritty gospel is fiery and unerring and his language is jolting, tender, as dependable as pulse.” –The Boston Globe
Praise for Colony Collapse Disorder
“Keith Flynn’s lyrical travelogue, a revolution of sound and story, celebrates the reader as witness. Not only are we transported to gorgeously-crafted locales, but we are rooted there by the poet’s unerring narrative, transforming each poem is a facet of light, an illuminative hallelujah. Scan the poetic landscape all you want–but you won’t find anything like this.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler
“Colony Collapse Disorder is a book of journeys, journeys across the world, journeys of conscience and witness, journeys of spiritual discovery. Flynn is one of our finest contemporary troubadours, heir to Bop, to the Beats, the poetry of Rock and Roll, the roar of Walt Whitman, and the seduction of cinema. He is a poet of overwhelming energy, in rebellious ballads, stunning life riffs, and wry meditations. In this work we feel a relish for both improvisation and craft, in delicate lyrics of longing, in songs of protest, and progressive commentary and today’s violent and chaotic news. Like the best music, Flynn’s poems bind us together with a shared sense of failure, challenge, joy and love.”
—Robert Morgan, author of Terrior
Links to Reviews of Colony Collapse Disorder:
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The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To
Make Your Poetry Swing
Published by Writer’s Digest Books, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58297-404-0 Paperback $16.99
Poetry and music have long been active bedfellows and in some cases it can be nearly impossible to separate the two. Whether dissecting Beatles lyrics or tapping out the beat to a Shakespeare soliloquy, the essence of poetry begins in rhyme and rhythm. Award-winning poet Keith Flynn understands this better than anyone. Combining a survey of the history of poetry with lessons for making all of your words swing the way they should, The Rhythm Method, Razzamatazz, and Memory is the ultimate learning tool for poets who want to find their perfect melody.
Flynn shows you how to tap into the music in your head and make your poetry dance along. Focusing on the stages of poetry, Flynn helps you build rhythm from the ground up, and explores the development of modern poetry at the same time, making sure that all the influences that made poetry great as a whole are also influencing your work. From Sylvia Plath to hip hop and poetry slams, he examines the growth of poetry and music while simultaneously delivering expert advice on form, description, influence, and most importantly, sound. Flynn shows you how to create poetry that begs to be read aloud, poetry that resonates in the air. It’s imperative for a poet to listen attentively to his or her inner voice, and The Rhythm Method, Razzamatazz, and Memory will make sure your voice keeps up and keeps time.
The Golden Ratio
Published by Iris Press, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-916078-94-2 Hardcover $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-916078-95-9 Paperback $16.00
Keith Flynn’s fourth and most innovative collection of poems to date, The Golden Ratio, is filled with themes of music and balance, creating a literary world in opposition to our discordant contemporary times, where the human population is at odds with one another and the Natural World, out of sync and unfocused, spiritually and physically adrift. The book’s six sections deal separately with the state of our government, our art forms, and our relationship and responsibility to the society that surrounds us. This book is a tour de force by one of our most distinctive poetic voices, seeking to redefine what it means to be human and creative in the face of overwhelming opposition.
Praise for The Golden Ratio
“In this new book, The Golden Ratio, Keith Flynn has achieved wonderful new heights, not only with language and the American vernacular, but with an immense historical sense and passionate individualism. The poems in this rich new collection zing with tremendous resonance… I’m elated to be able to acclaim Flynn’s poetry and voice as being absolutely necessary in this country’s vast and diverse poetic landscape. This is certainly a must-own, must-read volume of poetry by one of our very best contemporary poets!”
- Virgil Suarez, 90 Miles: Selected & New Poems
“Keith Flynn is a titanic poet whose vigor draws us into the illuminating questions of the soul and its elusive, various lights. These are wildly inventive poems to be shared and savored aloud. I found myself dancing around the house with Flynn’s words vibrating in both ears. Here is a poet who lives by the word, whose warm springs overflow with energy and brio, whose poems ring equally with all the beauty and peril of life.”
- Menna Elfyn, Cell Angel and Blind Man’s Kiss
“Keith Flynn’s magnificent The Golden Ratio is a brilliant collection in which, over and over, Apollonian and Dionysian elements conjoin then fly ecstatically apart, like a troupe of Chinese acrobats. Try a poem or two; you’ll likely want to own the book. Read the entire ‘Chang and Eng’ suite and you just may find this book has taken possession of you. For Flynn is a bard, the real thing, an artesian singer-sayer, tough as a harp, tender as a jailhouse file. He cunningly smuggles intellect and learning into topics so engaged that ‘flying barefoot through the lion’s gate,’ you might even imagine you are being dazzled not by the poet, but by the world itself.”
- William Pitt Root, White Boots: New and Collected Poems of the West
The Lost Sea
Published by Iris Press, 2000
ISBN: 0-916078-51-5 Paperback $13.00
Keith Flynn’s third collection of poems uses spectacular and musical language to address a wide range of crucial social, political and moral issues. These poems honor the visceral connection of the body and the physical world. Donald Revell’s essay at the beginning of The Lost Sea is a rare event: an introduction as finely crafted as the text it opens. Revell runs his finger along the seam between music and poetry: “Flynn’s poetic vision is a music, immediate, large and cosmologically local, wherever it happens and however it happens to transpire. In The Lost Sea, language is cleansed of second-hand representations and once again acquires, like Henry Thoreau’s Concord bells, sacred presence to one and to any one inclined by soul to hear.”
Praise for The Lost Sea
“Full to brimming,” the poems of Keith Flynn’s dazzling new collection, The Lost Sea, give no quarter. The ebullient range of unruly references and the fabulously rich lexicon combine to stretch the limits of coherence into a compelling, original style, Here, “flesh and mud meditations,” narratives unfolding like petals, dramatic monologues and surreal juxtapositions run together just ahead of an exclamation mark. The poems are politically incisive and emotionally dramatic. They careen toward the reader with unlikely energy, with the music of a mind awake.”
- Forrest Gander
“Keith Flynn’s wide-ranging poetic vision often takes him beyond the pale of much contemporary American verse. The poems in The Lost Sea can take on such far-flung topics as surrealism, cinema, music, politics, and post-modernism and make them spin with energy and wit. There is humor and history and a large helping of erudition in these poems. Flynn is a provocateur with a tender heart who possesses the scholar’s respect for tradition and the artist’s hunger for innovation. His world is large and always interesting, and he journeys through it with great elan.”
- Kathryn Stripling Byer
The Book of Monsters
Published by Urthona Press, 1994
Second Edition by Animal Sounds Press, 1996
ISBN: 1-889276-01-4 Paperback $12.00
“We expect our poets to go on dangerous missions,” says Rob Neufeld, describing The Book of Monsters, “into realms of personal psychology and social reality, and return changed, bearing new music. The motive for the journey is the sense that something is terribly wrong in our lives. This is no easy task because there are plenty of folk who can advocate temperance and condemn the malcontent. The poet’s return to society, therefore, better bring with it something that glows with renewed faith or smacks of truth. In this amazing collection, Flynn finds redemption for a mad clatter of castaways, villains, lost lovers, and forgotten heroes.”
Praise for The Book of Monsters
“These poems remember, as Heidegger said, “the oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us.” Keith Flynn writes raging visceral poems, searching out the dark corners of feeling, of need and surrender, so as to make the heart and body one. He is an American Rimbaud, whose morality is stronger than the Academy’s or of the institutions which claim to govern us.”
- Jeffery Beam, author of The Fountain and Visions of Dame Kind
“Keith Flynn is dungareed griot, hinge-hipped healer, a world rover with a heart where his pen should be. He’s a blues growler, a soul surgeon, a lover of momentum, a hundred kiss for the ears. He is deft and delicate, fiery and unerring. In these pages, he sees through to the bones of lovers and warriors, strangers and fools. According to his gritty gospel, we are all the monsters. And with this book, he has given us language–jolting, tender, as dependable as pulse.”
- Patricia Smith, The Boston Globe
“In The Book of Monsters, Keith Flynn rides the wave of a ‘fearful equilibrium,’ celebrating all that is vivid, tender, and mysterious in our lives. He knows the “bright rainbow landscapes of the damned”–where the mind and spirit compete for dominion and where the wrenching potencies of contemporary life deepen their hold over selfhood. In these beautiful and often startling poems, Flynn brings us nearer to ourselves.”
- Charles Fishman, author of The Death Mazurka and The Firewalkers
The Talking Drum
Published by Metropolis Communications, 1991
Second Edition by Animal Sounds Press, 1996
ISBN: 1-889276-00-6 Paperback $12.00
Flynn’s first collection, published in Nashville, Tennessee in 1991, gathers poems from the first ten years of his literary career. From long poems to smaller bursts of lively and lyrical language, The Talking Drum foreshadows the stunning imagery and unique voice that are hallmarks of Keith Flynn’s later work. “Those who know contemporary poetry,” writes David Brendan Hopes, “will be amazed to find intelligence and passion in a rare conjunction. These poems attempt so much, so many points of view, so many outcroppings of verbal pyrotechnics, so many moments of hardwon empathy. These will be the very virtues cited by its admirers: inclusiveness, abundance, splendor of expression, understanding almost wholly without judgment, judgment almost wholly without malice. There is learning and immersion in the great tradition of American letters, but Flynn’s poems actually transform the world and its objects into personalities that are graceful, fallible, feminine, and most importantly, saved. It is a lucky break to have Flynn and his many talents among us.”