Clues from the Animal Kingdom is Christopher Kennedy’s fifth collection. Christopher’s first BOA title, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death, won the Isabella Gardner Award in 2007.

Many of the poems in this collection deal with the subject of grief and depression. A sense of loss-and a quiet acceptance of loss as a constant companion-permeates the book, and the collection offers both a window into the experience of living with depression and hope for those experiencing mental illness.

Christopher is the director of the Syracuse University MFA program in creative writing, one of the top MFA programs in the country.

As with Christopher’s previous books, Clues from the Animal Kingdom embraces the prose poem as a formal entity and experiments with the musicality of sentences within each piece, which results in highly lyrical fusions of poetry and prose.