Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse
In language that twists together hobo slang and flights of troubadourish diction, Hearts Amok scrutinizes the history of the love sonnet in Surrey, England and simultaneously celebrates the tickings and tollings of one love-struck heart in Surrey, British Columbia. Examining the underpinnings of love, this book journeys from the Middle Ages to the present where Spenst dates his way through Vancouver to finally find the love of his life.
“Kevin Spenst’s Hearts Amok will shake you to your core. Everyday questions of love are earned, won, lost and then ultimately answered through the whirlwind of constantly spinning verse. Spenst uses the ‘moments between moments’ to wrap tongues around his own heart—and his city. With this hybrid memoir bathed in sonnet-esque waves, you are shipwrecked and soon realize that ‘only when love pretends to be voiceless are they telling the truth.’ And these dense truths are like ‘a million lifetimes of love’ boiled, condensed, written on a sugar packet, stuffed into an antique glass bottle and tossed out to sea.”
—Chelene Knight author of Dear Current Occupant
“Kevin Spenst is a literary hobo and court jester par excellence. Performing intricate feats of linguistic acrobatics and tender peaens to love, he concurrently pays tribute to a myriad of his literary influences while creating fresh subversions of known and beloved poetic language. Hearts Amok is a wild and wonderful feast for the mind, heart and spirit.”
—Lydia Kwa author of Oracle Bone and Sinuous
REVIEWS
by Catherine Owen for Marrow Reviews Read Online
FEBRUARY 5, 2022
As the ultimate poem in Kevin Spenst’s Hearts Amok: A memoir in verse states: “we are blessed something/tremendous” in this collection, massive with language, lingual tricks, verbal play ala Joyce, Stein, Carroll but with the overt intent always shimmering through like a contorted stream. Spenst’s sequences of sonnets, stanzas, swoopings (and one embedded villanelle that claims it’s a pantoum – while only repeating the first and third line as alternate last lines not the first and third as the second and fourth – apparently sewn by a Livesay-ian grandma “through winter-stripped willows” in Ducks and Rabbits Facing East and West), serves as the third volume in his trilogy, triptych, trinity of texts that trepan the past: from his father’s schizophrenia we then had the son’s Surrey sorrows and now to the mainly jubilant rudeness of meandering and more established (current…or is it now vanished?) loves.
The core diction in Hearts Amok‘s five swoony sections is drawn from A Dictionary of Hobo Slang, a rough, Anglo Saxon lexicon of the rails. So we relish the reckless tastiness of yegg, bazoo, skuds, prushun and solleret. As any poet should know, it’s the textures and musics of language in its specificities that create the content’s mesmeristic potential; no focus on sound, little compulsion to care about the subject matter. As Spenst himself underscores in his Afterword, “poetry is attention surprised by song.” Top notch sonnets include The Boxcar of Surrey Around Guilford Castle (the fusion of the eras is potent in leaps between Dante and The Thorn Birds), To Buss, Snog or Suaviate in the Language of Yes, Soggy Bottom Boy (not a sonnet but o its opening wham bam line, “Love is/ a psychosis”), To Victoria Park’s Glad Rags, Quiddity (codices! hypnopompic! vassal! and “heart-blurts in the dark”), Another Number of First Dates, How do I Lust after Thee (“starfish eyes” and “soggy zombie”) and (also not a sonnet) Out of One’s Tree, a direct piece on his father once more, his head a “hoard of axes and Ohs.”
