Böcker av Richard Kelly Kemick

Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives. A teenager's job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame upon the frozen waters of a subarctic lake. After her mother's death, a high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Church's Annual Young Writer's Short Story Competition. An incarcerated man considers the nature of justice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil War. Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average number of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider the mirage of authenticity and the impact of decisions we make-for better and for worse.

Shortlisted, Wilfrid Eggleston Award for NonfictionOn a whim, armchair-atheist Richard Kelly Kemick joins the 100-plus cast of The Canadian Badlands Passion Play, North Americas largest production of its kind and one of the main tourist attractions in Alberta. By the time closing night is over, Kemick has a story to tell. From the controversial choice of casting to the bizarre life in rehearsal, this glorious behind-the-scenes look at one of Canadas strangest theatrical spectacles also confronts the role of religion in contemporary life and the void left by its absence for non-believers.In the tradition of tragic luminaries such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Goldstein, and David Sedaris, I Am Herod gives its congregation of readers unparalleled access to the players of the Passion: theres Judas, who wears a leather jacket even when its 30EsC; the Chief Sadducee, who is ostracized for his fanaticism; Pilate, the only actor who swears; the Holy Spirit, who is breaking ground as the roles first female actor; and the understudy Christ, the previous years real-deal Christ who was demoted to backup and now performs illicit one-man shows backstage.

At one moment, a pure abstraction, at the next, an incontrovertible presence of hooves, antlers, and fur. The beating heart of this assured debut by Richard Kelly Kemick is the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic. Following the caribou through their annual cycle of migration, Kemick orchestrates a suite of poems both encyclopedic and lyrical, in which the caribou is both metaphor and phenomenon, both text and exegesis. He explores what we share with this creature of blood and bone and what is hidden, alien, and ineffable. "Caribou Run" serves notice that a formidable new talent has been let loose on the terrain of Canadian poetry. - 20160304"