"When I finished reading Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs I had to go to lunch with people in a restaurant with enormous beverages and misnamed sandwiches. I kept tapping my hand on the table and I didn t listen to anything anybody said. All I wanted to do was go home to read and write the kind of poetry Ellen Kennedy writes, declarative and nervous and wild and free. This is the sort of thing you want. This is the sort of book you should buy and you should buy it now instead of having lunch with those 'friends.' "
-Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs
"[A]bsurd...melancholic...feature[s] poems about nervousness, loneliness, Woody Allen, and Norm MacDonald."
- Nylon Magazine
"20-year old Ellen Kennedy's Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs is a gorgeous collection dealing with awkwardness, sex, fragility, affection and prosaic flights of fantasy in which Woody Allen is 'outed' and a lost manatee orbits Earth."
- Plan B
"She's in control of the power of the ordinary. The kind of poet you want to meet after reading."
- David Ohle, author of Motorman and The Age of Sinatra
"The whole book made me want to type in lower-case letters and chase around aging icons of Hollywood, trying to f-ck them."
- FREEwilliamsburg
"Abject hopelessness, awkward fumbling, and gentle anomie rarely feel so touching and funny as they do in the hands of Ellen Kennedy"
- Kathleen Rooney, Octopus Magazine
"It's simply brilliant and funny and sad, but sweetly so."
- Todd Colby, author of Tremble and Shine
"There's a kind of prose poetry that Ellen Kennedy has tapped into. It seems familiar if you've read Roland Barthes or Jim Carroll, and yet it is nothing like either."
- Fanzine
"Each line and sentence is laid bare as it wheels within a vortex of emotionless/emotional juxtapositions; there is nothing that distracts the reader, nothing that pulls the reader away from the page."
- Lee Rourke, 3:AM Magazine
"[A] moving lament of the disconnect between how we want to treat each other and how the world wants us to treat each other."
- Chris Tonelli, Open Letters Monthly
-Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs
"[A]bsurd...melancholic...feature[s] poems about nervousness, loneliness, Woody Allen, and Norm MacDonald."
- Nylon Magazine
"20-year old Ellen Kennedy's Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs is a gorgeous collection dealing with awkwardness, sex, fragility, affection and prosaic flights of fantasy in which Woody Allen is 'outed' and a lost manatee orbits Earth."
- Plan B
"She's in control of the power of the ordinary. The kind of poet you want to meet after reading."
- David Ohle, author of Motorman and The Age of Sinatra
"The whole book made me want to type in lower-case letters and chase around aging icons of Hollywood, trying to f-ck them."
- FREEwilliamsburg
"Abject hopelessness, awkward fumbling, and gentle anomie rarely feel so touching and funny as they do in the hands of Ellen Kennedy"
- Kathleen Rooney, Octopus Magazine
"It's simply brilliant and funny and sad, but sweetly so."
- Todd Colby, author of Tremble and Shine
"There's a kind of prose poetry that Ellen Kennedy has tapped into. It seems familiar if you've read Roland Barthes or Jim Carroll, and yet it is nothing like either."
- Fanzine
"Each line and sentence is laid bare as it wheels within a vortex of emotionless/emotional juxtapositions; there is nothing that distracts the reader, nothing that pulls the reader away from the page."
- Lee Rourke, 3:AM Magazine
"[A] moving lament of the disconnect between how we want to treat each other and how the world wants us to treat each other."
- Chris Tonelli, Open Letters Monthly
