About the Book

Black Lawrence Press is pleased to announce the publication of Kevin Pilkington’s latest collection, The Unemployed Man Who Became A Tree. These are Manhattan poems, down-and-out poems, looking for a job poems, regarding the world from a street corner poems. While wandering the avenues and the parks, a resolution is found, a chance to do the impossible: to put down roots in a rootless concrete world. The unemployed everyman simply becomes a tree.

Praise

Kevin Pilkington seems at home wherever he happens to find himself--New York, Greece, Key West. In this rich collection of tender poems, he celebrates the small consolations of daily life that offer spiritual relief in the face of disappointment and loss. Pilkington’s wry, playful humor serves as both weapon and tool. In a world bereft of miracles, he finds instead the sustaining spirit of what might pass for magic. These poems are deceptively modest and casual, offering up their playful jazzy riffs on daily life. There are no easy epiphanies here--just one poet working as hard as he can to get through daily life with dignity and grace. --Jim Daniels

The world is vivid and alive in Kevin Pilkington’s new collection of poems, and he catches it in quick transformations, so that we, too, see a distant schooner sail into a bottle, or feel the streets of New York suddenly become as rhythmic as music.  By turns bright and dark, close-held and wide-sweeping, these poems beckon for us to scramble out on to the fire escape and stand with the writer watching the world. --Rachel Cohen

It's thrilling to watch a poet create a world--fascinating when it turns out to be the one we live in. Kevin Pilkington's spare, subversive voice can conjure love from a donut, despair from Bloomingdale's. In "The Cat That Could Fly" a strange transcendence, made of lies, travels way beyond the self. Reading this beautiful and quietly visceral book, it's easy to forget each of us lives only once and dies alone. --Dennis Nurkse

About the Author

Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches a workshop in the graduate department at Manhattanville College.  He is the author of six collections: his collection Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner and his chapbook won the Ledge Poetry Prize. His collection entitled Ready to Eat the Sky was published by River City Publishing as part of their new poetry series and was a finalist for an Independent Publishers Books Award. His collection entitled In the Eyes of a Dog was published by New York Quarterly Books. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review, etc.  A novel entitled Summer Shares is forthcoming from Arche Books.

Looking for Work

I’d been out of work for a month

and knew it was time to get going

on my job search. So I got out

of bed, gazed out the window, looked

for a job, saw nothing that interested

me, crawled under the covers again

and fell back to sleep.

An hour later, I got up, brewed

coffee, made it strong, the color

of wet road, then traveled a mile

with my throat until the pot was empty.

I didn’t go out at all the day

before but knew everything worth

missing was just outside my door

in the paper. Even with Monday

folded over with a crease through

noon, fifty cents seemed too

expensive for a day I basically

slept through.

The lead story reported a man

was shot just a few blocks

away, and though I hate guns,

I rifled through the rest of the paper,

tossed it on the floor then went

over to the refrigerator, even though 

I don’t believe in miracles and opened

it. None was going to take place on

that day either: no food appeared

just an old piece of steak I cooked once,

that looked raw as last December.

With the temperature reaching

for 90º again and knowing

it shouldn’t reach for anything

beyond its grasp, I decided to get

dressed and walk over to St. James.

It’s a Catholic church but since

the saints inside are still concrete,

I like to go in on weekdays where

it’s cool, dark and empty. The strange

part is it feels like home. I’ve decided

it’s the candles who look like my

relatives. Irish. Each flame a jig,

lit up on Guinness instead of matches.

Article Title

ISBN: 978-0-9826364-6-6

$14

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