The Book of Jonah

by Luke Kennard

'Kennard’s distinctive voice – surreal, funny, anxious, always overthinking, and cringingly self-deprecating – has made him one of the most widely liked and imitated British poets under forty' – Tristram Fane Saunders, TLS

None of the Old Testament prophets was especially happy or confident in their calling, but Jonah was the only one who rejected it outright, disobeying direct instruction from God and literally running away. In The Book of Jonah, Luke Kennard transforms the unique and awkward position Jonah’s story occupies in scripture – part dream, part joke, part provocation – into a madcap picaresque which marries the sacred and the absurd.

Though Jonah’s encounter with the whale is most commonly interpreted as the story of a reluctant prophet being punished by his maker, Kennard’s Jonah is more wily business traveller than seer. Taking his instruction instead from non-governmental organisations, arts development agencies and public relations gurus, this Jonah keeps relentlessly busy, accepting any assignment that will take him further away from Nineveh and drown out the word of God in his ears. On his travels he meets errant writers, fixers, artists and consultants, but nobody who can give him a sense of what his work might be beyond a five-star capitalist purgatory in a series of exotic locations. What would it mean to be a prophet – or even a false prophet – in this milieu?

Taking on the decimation of funding for the arts, the emptiness of the hero’s journey, and a literary culture regarded by wider society with cynicism, ignorance and apathy, The Book of Jonah is a blistering new collection from the Forward Prize-winning author of Notes on the Sonnets.

Genres: Poetry

159 pages, Paperback

Published December 9, 2025

Reviews

[W.S. Luk · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Jonah is either a weaponised fairy tale or a re-enchanted history."

We all know the story of Jonah, or at least its main highlight: a prophet gets eaten by a fish. But THE BOOK OF JONAH fragments and adapts this Old Testament narrative, juxtaposing contradictory images of the prophet or recasting him as a wanderer in the modern media landscape, struggling to make sense of a life lived in hotels and swanky conferences. At its best, Kennard's poems are sensitive to the theological and social implications of this story: what does it mean for a prophet to reject his calling, or for his audience to respond far more enthusiastically than expected? And how does that change at a time when promotion and persuasion manipulate life's every aspect? Blending satire and surreally fragmented images, Kennard's most successful pieces—"Expolitio/Exergasia", "Écrivains Sans Frontières", "aller en bateau" and the "Lectures"—challenge our presumptions about life in an idea-saturated age.

However, this emphasis on combining varied and jarring images also leads to a number of poems that feel like they lose the thread of the story of Jonah, or lean into strange images for their own sake (a particularly jarring element when placed against the level of technical detail Kennard employs in citing different theological authorities). The result is thus sometimes distracting, bogging down the length of this collection.

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four and a half stars

There is some great poetry in here. Some of the poems, I feel, go on a bit. It starts off strongly but falters a little in the middle.