Room to Swing a Cat

Ruthie Kennedy
OrangeApple Press

Ruthie Kennedy’s beautiful debut, initially released as an online publication in 2020, is now available as a physical pamphlet, fresh from a zesty and thrilling first series of publications released by OrangeApple Press. In these poems, you can feel the energetic bubbling of ‘Growing sideways’, as minute details are made expansive, more complex: ‘the world is smaller, bigger and confusing’.

Within this bubbling, memory complicates and continually rewires the self: ‘Remembers not the dread electric bug,//fails to recall pre-dial-up connection’. What does it mean to consider the ‘turn of a millennium’ the ‘turn of a life’?

There is a cyclical re-call in the pamphlet’s structure, and Room to Swing a Cat leaves space for the reader to enter, through a patchwork of forms, swinging and colliding: there are narratives turns in its prose poem fragments, alongside short blocks of texts reflecting inner, often surreal splices of thought, smaller stanzas of concentrated images and even a list of ‘Nightly Checks’; Kennedy is expanding and questioning what a poem can see, be and do. Intimate and tender, with play and subtle cheekiness peeking through the language, these poems strikingly display what it is to be in a continual moment of becoming and instability, in a world where emotions are complicated, the ‘little family has become a war zone’ and being small is powerful:

‘She tucks her mind into this secret cave//where, if not exactly noticed, she may//be seen. Be one of millions.’

—Kirsty Dunlop