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All Told
In All Told, Mel Kenne traces the echoes of memory, place, and identity through vivid, resonant verse. From the haunted landscapes of the American South to the shifting light of Istanbul, these poems reckon with love, loss, and the fools we all become in pursuit of meaning. Kenne’s language is sharp, wry, and wise, and his reflections unforgettable.
“Quizzical, meditative, wondering, Mel Kenne’s tone of voice marks him out as a true original, and one with a delightfully wry sense of humor. Kenne also dispenses a fund of down-to-earth good sense, something one does not always find in lyric poetry.”
— John Ash, on Take
“I love the quality of mind, the unpretentious way of being in the world and reflecting on it, in Mel Kenne’s poems. He achieves a kind of expansiveness, a sense of being unconstrained and totally himself…Like Whitman, like Frank O’Hara, he is eminently companionable, and his presence on the page is somehow very reassuring in its acceptance of the human condition, with, in his words, ‘life’s weight of joy uncertainty and grief.’ ”
— Richard Tillinghast, on Take
“Kenne does not grandstand the pathos of his situations, but focuses the poem as a documentary on a range of ordinary events — waiting for buses, or dawdling away an afternoon over aimless thoughts…or bickering with self over the purchase of a book of poems with his last five dollars.”
— Paul Christensen, on Eating the Fruit
“[Kenne’s] voice—wise, assured, wry—can sometimes feel detached, but by the time the poem sounds its last line, it is clear that Kenne is passionately involved with his topic... Phantasmagorical, elusive, and possessed of a haunting beauty, this poetry does what no ordinary prose—with its concerns for the straight-edged, the clearly defined, the pragmatic and encapsulated—can do, and it does it without degenerating into the sort of gibberish so often tendered as ‘avant-garde’ verse.”
— Vincent Czyz, from Arts Fuse review of Take
"To read Mel Kenne is to come face-to-face with an original. Over the course of five decades he has been loyal to the Muse. This distillation of a life's work has finally arrived. It shows a mutual trust between the heart and the mind, a rarity considering the state of much American poetry which seems to be all mind in its academic erudition. His poems are a joy to read and examine."
— Ken Fontenot, winner of the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters award for best poetry book in Texas.
“Quizzical, meditative, wondering, Mel Kenne’s tone of voice marks him out as a true original, and one with a delightfully wry sense of humor. Kenne also dispenses a fund of down-to-earth good sense, something one does not always find in lyric poetry.”
— John Ash, on Take
“I love the quality of mind, the unpretentious way of being in the world and reflecting on it, in Mel Kenne’s poems. He achieves a kind of expansiveness, a sense of being unconstrained and totally himself…Like Whitman, like Frank O’Hara, he is eminently companionable, and his presence on the page is somehow very reassuring in its acceptance of the human condition, with, in his words, ‘life’s weight of joy uncertainty and grief.’ ”
— Richard Tillinghast, on Take
“Kenne does not grandstand the pathos of his situations, but focuses the poem as a documentary on a range of ordinary events — waiting for buses, or dawdling away an afternoon over aimless thoughts…or bickering with self over the purchase of a book of poems with his last five dollars.”
— Paul Christensen, on Eating the Fruit
“[Kenne’s] voice—wise, assured, wry—can sometimes feel detached, but by the time the poem sounds its last line, it is clear that Kenne is passionately involved with his topic... Phantasmagorical, elusive, and possessed of a haunting beauty, this poetry does what no ordinary prose—with its concerns for the straight-edged, the clearly defined, the pragmatic and encapsulated—can do, and it does it without degenerating into the sort of gibberish so often tendered as ‘avant-garde’ verse.”
— Vincent Czyz, from Arts Fuse review of Take
"To read Mel Kenne is to come face-to-face with an original. Over the course of five decades he has been loyal to the Muse. This distillation of a life's work has finally arrived. It shows a mutual trust between the heart and the mind, a rarity considering the state of much American poetry which seems to be all mind in its academic erudition. His poems are a joy to read and examine."
— Ken Fontenot, winner of the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters award for best poetry book in Texas.
193 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 11, 2025
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March 4, 2026
All Told is a big, loose, lived-in gathering of poems that tracks a whole life, not in a straight line, but in loops of memory, travel, politics, love, and aging. Kenne starts by greeting the reader in a plain kitchen where “the beans are simmering in the pot” and cornbread is in the pan, then moves through childhood on the Gulf Coast, work on farms and in gins, long nights in bars, years in Mexico and Turkey, and into late-life classrooms and quiet rooms where the poet waits for the phone to ring. Sections like “South,” “The Scene Today,” “In a Country of Cars,” “The Art of Facing Oneself as a Ghost,” “The Way of the Fool,” “All Told,” and “I’m in Your Hands” give the book a loose arc from place and family toward wider public life and finally back to intimate friendships and love. The whole thing feels like a story told over many long evenings.
I enjoyed how sturdy and grounded the writing feels. Kenne likes real rooms, real weather, real work. In “This House” he watches the “gray ghost” of his father ride a lawnmower past mesquite and blue norther wind, then lets time jump so the same house lifts and settles in summer heat. The language stays simple. The images do the heavy lifting. A poem about a timing chain in a car, a night shift, or a mechanic’s bad news turns into a little parable about fear and delay without any fuss. His long piece “Smitty, Wallace and Me” circles around a neighbor rewiring his stereo and Wallace Stevens on the bookshelf, and somehow it becomes a quiet essay on communication, performance, and the way our “systems” of living barely touch each other. I liked the relaxed, talky tone. It never felt like the poems were trying to impress me. They just kept showing me things until I started to care.
I also liked how wide the book opens out into the world. Kenne writes beautifully about Istanbul, standing at his window over the Bosporus while birds spin like white confetti and traffic roars across the bridge, and he slides from that scene into music, Turkish poets, and the weird parade of late-century life. The poems in “The Scene Today” and “In a Country of Cars” keep running this line between wonder and annoyance, affection and disgust, as he watches consumer culture, car culture, war memorials, and election years roll past. There is real bite in titles like “America, You Son-of-a-Bitch,” “Election Year,” and “Against Monotheism,” yet the poems almost always come back to one human voice, tired and worried, trying to stay honest inside all that noise. The long sequence about “The Fool” lets him poke fun at himself and at power in mythic language, but underneath the jokes I heard real loneliness, a man who says his main power now is to sit, wait, and be “an empty room / waiting for you to walk in,” and I felt that in my gut.
Under the craft and the travel and the politics, the book feels tender. The early section “South” holds family ghosts, drought, letters from his mother, and awkward boyhood memories. Later on, in “I’m in Your Hands,” he turns toward teaching, old students, old friends, love poems, and a cat named Kestane who becomes a way to think about God. The tone softens without losing edge. I felt a steady ache running through these later poems, but also a kind of rough gratitude. The book accepts confusion and keeps talking anyway. I found that comforting.
All Told is better taken in sections, like a long road trip with stops in little towns, diners, and old neighborhoods. I would recommend it to readers who like narrative, place-rich poetry, to people who grew up in or around the American South, to anyone who has lived abroad and still feels torn between worlds, and to teachers and writers thinking about their own long haul. If you want clear, humane, often funny, often bruised poems that let you sit in the room with a working poet and see what a whole life looks like from the inside, this book is worth your time.
I enjoyed how sturdy and grounded the writing feels. Kenne likes real rooms, real weather, real work. In “This House” he watches the “gray ghost” of his father ride a lawnmower past mesquite and blue norther wind, then lets time jump so the same house lifts and settles in summer heat. The language stays simple. The images do the heavy lifting. A poem about a timing chain in a car, a night shift, or a mechanic’s bad news turns into a little parable about fear and delay without any fuss. His long piece “Smitty, Wallace and Me” circles around a neighbor rewiring his stereo and Wallace Stevens on the bookshelf, and somehow it becomes a quiet essay on communication, performance, and the way our “systems” of living barely touch each other. I liked the relaxed, talky tone. It never felt like the poems were trying to impress me. They just kept showing me things until I started to care.
I also liked how wide the book opens out into the world. Kenne writes beautifully about Istanbul, standing at his window over the Bosporus while birds spin like white confetti and traffic roars across the bridge, and he slides from that scene into music, Turkish poets, and the weird parade of late-century life. The poems in “The Scene Today” and “In a Country of Cars” keep running this line between wonder and annoyance, affection and disgust, as he watches consumer culture, car culture, war memorials, and election years roll past. There is real bite in titles like “America, You Son-of-a-Bitch,” “Election Year,” and “Against Monotheism,” yet the poems almost always come back to one human voice, tired and worried, trying to stay honest inside all that noise. The long sequence about “The Fool” lets him poke fun at himself and at power in mythic language, but underneath the jokes I heard real loneliness, a man who says his main power now is to sit, wait, and be “an empty room / waiting for you to walk in,” and I felt that in my gut.
Under the craft and the travel and the politics, the book feels tender. The early section “South” holds family ghosts, drought, letters from his mother, and awkward boyhood memories. Later on, in “I’m in Your Hands,” he turns toward teaching, old students, old friends, love poems, and a cat named Kestane who becomes a way to think about God. The tone softens without losing edge. I felt a steady ache running through these later poems, but also a kind of rough gratitude. The book accepts confusion and keeps talking anyway. I found that comforting.
All Told is better taken in sections, like a long road trip with stops in little towns, diners, and old neighborhoods. I would recommend it to readers who like narrative, place-rich poetry, to people who grew up in or around the American South, to anyone who has lived abroad and still feels torn between worlds, and to teachers and writers thinking about their own long haul. If you want clear, humane, often funny, often bruised poems that let you sit in the room with a working poet and see what a whole life looks like from the inside, this book is worth your time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review