Rites of Passage, by Mel Kenne

In Rites of Passage, Mel Kenne offers a lyrical journey through memory, mortality, and the shifting ground of identity. With poems both tender and unflinching, Kenne confronts the beauty and burden of existence, tracing the quiet rituals that mark our lives and the questions that remain long after.

“Quizzical, meditative, wondering, Mel Kenne’s tone of voice marks him out as a true original, and one with a delightfully wry sense of humor. Kenne also dispenses a fund of down-to-earth good sense, something one does not always find in lyric poetry.”

— John Ash, on Take

“I love the quality of mind, the unpretentious way of being in the world and reflecting on it, in Mel Kenne’s poems. He achieves a kind of expansiveness, a sense of being unconstrained and totally himself…Like Whitman, like Frank O’Hara, he is eminently companionable, and his presence on the page is somehow very reassuring in its acceptance of the human condition, with, in his words, ‘life’s weight of joy uncertainty and grief.’ ”

— Richard Tillinghast, on Take

“Kenne does not grandstand the pathos of his situations, but focuses the poem as a documentary on a range of ordinary events — waiting for buses, or dawdling away an afternoon over aimless thoughts…or bickering with self over the purchase of a book of poems with his last five dollars.”

— Paul Christensen, on Eating the Fruit

“[Kenne’s] voice—wise, assured, wry—can sometimes feel detached, but by the time the poem sounds its last line, it is clear that Kenne is passionately involved with his topic… Phantasmagorical, elusive, and possessed of a haunting beauty, this poetry does what no ordinary prose—with its concerns for the straight-edged, the clearly defined, the pragmatic and encapsulated—can do, and it does it without degenerating into the sort of gibberish so often tendered as ‘avant-garde’ verse.”

— Vincent Czyz, from Arts Fuse review of Take

“To read Mel Kenne is to come face-to-face with an original. Over the course of five decades he has been loyal to the Muse. This distillation of a life’s work has finally arrived. It shows a mutual trust between the heart and the mind, a rarity considering the state of much American poetry which seems to be all mind in its academic erudition. His poems are a joy to read and examine.”

— Ken Fontenot, winner of the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters award for best poetry book in Texas.