Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Joseph Kidney

“... Waves, / to me, have always looked like the ocean petting / the beach. There there, it consoles. Hear hear, / I approve. As in it’s clear who domesticated who.” That’s a taste of Joseph Kidney’s work — wry, poignant, keenly observant of the natural world — from one of the poems in his collection, Devotional Forensics , which received the 2026 Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize. Kidney is also a scholar of Renaissance literature and lecturer at Stanford University. In this reflective conversation, he and Pádraig Ó Tuama speak about his appreciation of birds, the physicality and musicality that he strives to bring to his verse, and his love of “false etymlogies”.  

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Joseph Kidney is the author of the collection Devotional Forensics , which was published in 2025 by icehouse poetry and Goose Lane Editions. It received the 2026 Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize. Kidney currently lectures at Stanford University in the U.S. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org .

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