BLURBS for FATHER TECTONIC

“Isn’t wonderful to think ‘what the fuck?’ as a precursor to the discovery of wondrous poesy unknown but, so soon, to be so totally embalmed and engrossed in its singular sensibility. It is, as such, that I thankfully encountered ‘Father Tectonic’, engaged with it and became changed. Robert Frede Kenter’s work is like a listless knife-edge radiating a vibrato that is at once beguiling and disconcerting. His words, herein, deftly sculpted with a logic that is both charming and foreboding, that threatens its own disassembly and, yet, through reading, we become willing captives in that the mazes and webs of his poetic assemblage that disorientates so profoundly that we can only ever twinkle at the joy of own resultant shapeshift and self-recognition. What an astounding journey!”

— Barney Ashton-Bullock, author of and Beau, Beau Sadisto! (Back Room Poetry, 2023), and Cul-de-Sacrilege! (Polari Press, 2022)

“In Robert Frede Kenter’s enigmatic chapbook, the nuclear family is the locus of dis-ease, and violence is rendered through the breakage of language, the violence of the broken line with its nightnesses and brutal houses, its songs pulsing with fists and hooves. There is nothing sparing in these poems, nothing done sparingly. The reader too will not be spared this witnessing. Though the collection’s central concern is the speaker’s relationship with their father, it is memory that is ever-present and ever shifting between the people occupying these poems, within the bodies of the poems and the people themselves. It is memory that can be little more than a father. It is memory that binds, that doesn’t rest, that both repudiates and enforces violence. This restlessness haunts and storms through the pages of this book, forcing one not to look away. This is a startlingly rendered collection by a wonderful poet, made more devastating in its concision, in its brevity, in its refusals.”
— Chelsea Dingman, author of I, Divided (LSU Press, 2023), Through a Small Ghost (University of Georgia Press, 2020)

“Robert Frede Kenter has written a startling and deeply vulnerable book -- he leads us on a harrowing journey through time and we are broken apart in an Eden of wounds. Father Tectonic is a beautifully raw and compelling read.”
—Stephanie C. Smith, author of Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination(University of North Carolina Press, 2024)

“Father Tectonic is memory etched in a poetry of desire and longing. In this book, think of Kafka and his father, except that Robert Frede Kenter is a painter of wild colors, and his poems are the kind of paintings you experience in the dream world—lucid, palpable, yet impressionistic and always fantastic. This is a wildly imaginative, deeply personal, tender work.”
—  Bunkong Tuon, author of Koan Khmer. (Northwestern University Press) and What is Left (Jacar Press, 2024).



“Incisive, brave and deeply personal, the poems in Father Tectonic are like contrapuntal music in a volatile familial terrain – sometimes harmonic, often dissonant – giving voice and immediacy to memory itself through dynamics within the domestic nucleus.

Exploring the impact of a father diagnosed with mental illness and drug dependency, Kenter’s unflinching poetics portray an individual’s life of excess and decline as it plays out against the zeitgeist of late 20th- early 21st century Western culture. Visionary in its appeal, the work deconstructs tensions of domestic love and violence, drawing acute parallels with a wider disorder within controlling patriarchal systems. In this regard, it is microcosmic, speaking not only to the breakdown of one figure, but the collective dialogue of justice and peace across global communities.

Precinct in spirit and form, these verses ultimately allude that the psyche, much like poetry, is irrational, fragmented and highly paradoxical. Here, Kenter’s landscape is one governed by its own extreme laws, a premise which challenges and reconciles personal perceptions with pressing societal concerns. The result is a potent and expansive vernacular of its own. Intimate, resonant and urgent, Father Tectonic reverberates with beauty and loss, acknowledging the complexities of the human ego, whilst signalling a larger plea for profound and radical change.”
— Vikki C., author of Where Sands Run Finest and The Art of Glass Houses.

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