Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

by Lawrence Kessenich

In Hard Times Require Furious Dancing , Lawrence Kessenich shows himself to be a poet of finely tuned attention to the phenomenal world and to the chords and colors, the phrasings and understandings it engenders. These poems, honed in hard times, are always in service to the furiously dancing spirit of poetry; in other words, they are true.
~ Richard Hoffman, author of Noon until Night and People Once Real

107 pages, Paperback

Published August 7, 2023

About the author

Lawrence Kessenich is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, essayist, reviewer, editor, and teacher. He has published a number of short stories and won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. He has published four books of poetry and two novels: He has also published essays, one of which was featured on NPR’s “This I Believe” and appears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love. His short plays have been produced in New York, Boston, and in Colorado, where he won the People’s Choice Award in a national drama competition. Kessenich is the co-managing editor of Ibbbetson Street literary magazine.

​Kessenich was born and raised in Wisconsin in a loving family of nine children. He attended St. Monica's grade school in Whitefish Bay, Messmer High School in the city of Milwaukee, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was also briefly in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. After attending the Radcliffe Publishing Course, he spent 10 years in the editorial department at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, where he edited Shoeless Joe, the basis for the movie Field of Dreams (in which he and his wife Janet appear onscreen as extras), and many other fiction and nonfiction books.

​Since leaving book publishing, Kessenich has made his living first as a technical writer and then as a marketing writer. He has also taught classes on writing and book publishing. He lives in the Boston area and is happy to consider readings, speaking engagements, workshops, and writing and editing work.

Honors
- Strokestown International Poetry Prize
- People's Choice Award at national Durango
10-Minute Play Festival
- Essay read on NPR's This I Believe and included in This I Believe:On Love anthology
- 3 poems read on NPR's Writer's Almanac
- 3 poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize
- 1st Prize in national Spirit First Poetry Contest

Reviews

[Laura Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this author's poetry. It's incredibly accessible while at the same time being incredibly rich. There's emotion, beautiful imagery, spirituality, and humor to be found in these words. The prose poems at the end were a delight, and I'm hard-pressed to pick a favorite or even a top ten from this collection, though "What Snow Loves," "The Pen and the Bat," and "The White Bag" are several that stood out.