Keep Your Damn Seat is Caroline Kane Kenna’s debut chapbook. She is an accidental poet, occasional essayist and a newspaper reporter before the internet. While a trailing spouse, and stay at home Mom for three sons, she drafted several novels, wrote memoir in the Midwest and discovered poetry and her people when the family moved to North Carolina. Her poems have placed in Charlotte Writers Club contests, are published in anthologies, Above the Fold (Main Street Rag), Kakalak. The North Carolina Poetry Society Poetry in Plain Sight, Charlotte Art League gallery ekphrastic exhibits and essays in Fool Hardy, (The Personal Story Publishing Project) The Love of Baseball, (McFarland) and Reflections on the New River (McFarland) A former Charlotte Writers Club president and member of the board of directors, she attends Table Rock Writers Conference, is a poet in the “free nation” of Shabazz and frequents open mics in the Charlotte NC area. She holds batchelor’s degrees from King College and Memphis State.
PRAISE:
Keep Your Damn Seat delves into memory, loss, and the fragile beauty of life. In “I’m Lucky, I Know,” vulnerability and survival collide in a moment of quiet reflection, while “Time Is Wasting” confronts a planet on the brink of collapse. “Travelogue” captures the shifting journey of life, where home is never fixed but always felt. These poems challenge us to reckon with our place in the world before it’s too late, urging action with the reminder, “We humans are Earth’s best hope unless the last bee dies.”
A thought-provoking exploration of survival, love, and the urgent need to preserve what we hold dear.
–Phillip Shabazz, author of Flames In The Fire
Caroline Kenna achieves a loosely woven effect in her chapbook, each poem shining alone, illuminating the dominant theme of home. She is a poet who pauses and listens for the slightest change in hum in her sphere, as do the angels in her ekphrastic poem “Moving Parts.” Her zesty style is remarkably pervasive for a chapbook touching on many aspects of aging. Crone-age dreams remain unfulfilled, as the poet travels with her husband in an Antimatter Blue Ford…pickup built to [his] specs, pulling/ [their] fifth-wheel camper, defying the carbon footprint she had envisioned. Wisdom, seasoned with joy and laughter even amid deep losses, binds this book. Kenna, a forward-looking poet who knows so well that the shelf life of honey is longer than ours, asserts: We humans are Earth’s best hope unless…. Unless. In one word, Kenna shows how so much in life and in poetry depends upon a turn.
–Irene Blair Honeycutt, award-winning poet, Mountains of the Moon
“Caroline’s work in Keep Your Damn Seat feels as if you’ve gone to visit the only family member who can give you insight when you’re looking for who you are and who you want to be. It is grit and grits, a warm handmade blanket stitched with family memories, stories that shaped us. It is the back porch rocking chair conversation you didn’t know you needed, and the reason we need Caroline’s voice for the next generation. It is a middle finger to the bias of aging, and the open road of freedom age grants us when we get older, braver, wise enough to know what matters most. The poetry is a breathtaking collage of images and sensory language that transport the reader into the story. You want to take this ride, and you won’t want it to be over.”
–Shane Manier, Poetry Coach and Tedx Speaker
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