Jesus Was a Homeboy

by Kevin Carey

In Jesus was a Homeboy, Carey returns to the urban beach front, the dusty gymnasiums, the barrooms and the restaurants that have defined the chapters of his life. It’s an honest reflection of one man’s life with all its flaws and regrets, connecting the reader with the real drama of everyday life – aging, acknowledging past mistakes, and wishing things had been different but still being able to celebrate and hold onto those moments that make us appreciate what we have.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2016

About the author

Kevin Carey is the author of a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People (Red Bird Chapbooks) and three books of poetry from CavanKerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy which was selected as an Honor Book for the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize, and the recently released Set in Stone (2020).

Kevin is also a filmmaker and playwright. His latest documentary film, Unburying Malcolm Miller, about a deceased Salem, MA poet, premiered at the Mass Poetry Festival in 2016 and his latest stage play “The Stand or Sal is Dead” a murder mystery comedy, premiered in Newburyport, MA. at The Actor’s Studio in June of 2018.

Murder in the Marsh (Darkstroke Books) his first crime novel was released in October 2020.

Reviews

[R.G. Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the poems in Kevin Carey’s Jesus Was a Homeboy can make one believe, even in this season of cynicism, that it’s still possible to tell the truth. That what each of these poems feels like: a tiny slice of the truth, spoken directly to you in a voice that can tell you no lies. Carey is an elegiac raconteur trusting his reader to share in his snapshots of coffee shops, basketball dreams, and memories of family life gone by. Carey’s poems lament how quickly time passes: the speaker sometimes confronts and celebrates his own lost youth, sometimes wishes he could preserve his children as children forever. Time is, in fact, the antagonist in much of Jesus Was a Homeboy, the windmill at which the speaker often tilts in vain—and that is what makes these poems so compelling. We know that time is short but art is long. Carey’s poems tell us so, and Carey speaks the truth.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Free-wheeling narrative observatory poetry about Irish American life with lots of moments about reading, family, whiskey, & basketball worked for me.