The poems of Erik Kennedy’s Twenty-Six Factitions take the reader on a fact-packed journey into the particular, from Salisbury to Syria to the lonely outer reaches of the solar system. With as much humour as pathos, Kennedy draws attention to the bewildering amount of information that fills our lives—and makes our lives worth living. “Each of these poems,” he notes, “is bound by the same constraints: it must mention a statistic or figure; it must mention a proper-noun place; and it must allude, at least obliquely, to mortality . . . If you want to, it is possible to read the whole sequence as a philippic against poetic vagueness, which no amount of earnest exactitude ever seems to make any headway against. The nonce word ‘factition’ simultaneously evokes (I hope) fact, fiction, and factitiousness (artificiality).”

Erik Kennedy’s first full-length book of poems will appear with Victoria University Press in 2018. He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, and is the poetry editor for Queen Mob’s Teahouse.