The Migraine Hotel

Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.

-- Nick Laird * The Telegraph *

There is a considerable intelligence and stylishness in his wry domestication of the beautiful swerves and non-sequiturs of Ashbery's poems, plus a high degree of overt self-consciousness: several poems discuss and undermine their own procedures, or disarm potential criticism. Their main charm, though, is that they are – with their engagingly downbeat, faux-naïve narrators – genuinely funny.

-- Robert Potts * The Telegraph *

Hailed as a witty wunderkind in the poetry world, 26-year-old Kennard starts with contemporary cultural slickness and moves brilliantly into the surreal. Truly, a poet to watch

-- Christina Patterson * The Independent *

The Migraine Hotel, by Luke Kennard (Salt): Luke Kennard's The Harbour Beyond the Movie was that rare commodity: a poetry collection both excellent and laugh-out-loud funny. His latest offering – in which he considers heartbreak, despair and the pleasures of schadenfreude via his own sui generis brand of didactic humour – doesn't disappoint. Fans will be delighted by the return of Wolf, who this time ventures into the fields of psychotherapy and national identity ("'Fortunately my mother was Opus Dei and my father a Methodist,' says the wolf. 'Thus, on Tuesdays, I am Catholic in the mornings and Protestant in the afternoons'").

-- Sarah Crown * The Guardi