Nice Fish

Literature & Fiction

Rylance, Mark

Jenkins, Louis

Dramas & Plays

Concord Theatricals

On a frozen Minnesota lake, the ice is beginning to creak and groan. It’s the end of the fishing season and on the frostbitten, unforgiving landscape, two friends are out on the ice, angling for something big, something down there that, had it the wherewithal, could swallow them whole. With the existentialism of a Beckett two-hander but set in the icy and folksy depths of the Midwest, Nice Fish is a unique portrayal of a friendship forged out of boredom, bad jokes, and an ability to wait for a really nice fish. Nice Fish premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge Massachusetts, directed by Claire van Kampen, and played to rave reviews in a sold-out extended run in New York in February 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, starring Mark Rylance and Jim Lichtscheidl, and featuring Louis Jenkins. The play transferred to London for a run in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre, beginning in November 2016.

Nice Fish: A Play

GROVE PRESS

Louis Jenkins capturesnails down really!whole moments in time and space, completely decorated with all the essential textual things needed to make them vibrate and shudder with life.”Clarence Major
 Several of these poems are included in the performance script of NICE FISH, the play. The 60 new prose poems in Sea Smoke continue Louis Jenkins’ imaginative glimpses of scenes from contemporary life. Many of these pieces begin with the ordinary, but a subtle pivot in language propels the reader into an unexpected and oftentimes humorous perspective from which to view the world anew. Herein the blue moon is unhappy as it gazes into car windows, clouds sweep across the horizon as if serving Genghis Khan, and the poet considers the benefits of retirement:
Retirement
I’ve been thinking of retiring, of selling the poetry business and enjoying my twilight years. It’s a prose poem business, so it’s a niche market. Still, after thirty some years, I must have assets worth well in excess of $300. Perhaps the new owner of the business will want to diversify, go into novels or plays, or perhaps merge into a school or movement. It won’t matter to me once I’ve retired. Maybe I’ll do a little traveling, winter in the Southwest. Take up golf. Spend more time with the family. Maybe I’ll just walk around and look at things with absolutely no compulsion to say anything at all about them.
Louis Jenkins lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. His books of poetry include An Almost Human Gesture (Eighties Press and Ally Press, 1987), All Tangled Up With the Living (Nineties Press, 1991), Nice Fish: New &amp; Selected Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1995), Just Above Water (Holy Cow! Press, 1997), and The Winter Road (Holy Cow! Press, 2000). Some of his prose poems were published in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner) and in Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003).

Sea Smoke

Poetry

Holy Cow! Press

"Louis Jenkins writes satire as elegant as Horace but with motors in it and telephones and the North Shore."—Garrison Keillor
 Several of these poems are included in the performance script for NICE FISH, the play. From the acknowledged "master" of the prose poem comes a new gathering of sixty poems. The work in The Winter Road comprises an extended meditation on the nature of memory and its influence on everyday reality. Within poems that turn whimsical, ironic, and serious, whole imaginative worlds are created and glide the reader into pleasing and unexpected territory. As when Coronado's search for gold lands him empty-handed in Kansas, Jenkins reminds us that "miracles always have a cost," and that our desire for absolute truth can sometimes lead us nowhere.
Louis Jenkins' poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, et al. and in The Best American Poetry 1999. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.
Old Man Winter
Old man Winter doesn't like anything. He doesn't like dogs or cats or squirrels or birds, especially seagulls, or children or smart-ass college students. He doesn't like loggers or environ- mentalists or snowmobilers or skiers in their stupid lycra outfits. He doesn't like Christmas or television. He doesn't like bureau- crats, lawyers or pliticians. There is a thing or two he could say to the host of the local talk-radio show but he knows for a fact that the son-of-a-bitch does the broadcast from his condo in Florida. He's pissed off about the OPEC oil conspiracy and the conspiracy of gas station owners to raise prices. He doesn't like foreigners and he doesn't like his neighbors (not that he has many); when they finally die they just leave their junk all over the yard. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like the look of the sky right now, either, overcast, a kind of jaundice color. He hates that. And that stand of spruce trees behind the house turning black in the dusk . . . . The way it gets dark earlier every day. He doesn't like that.

Winter Road

Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, 1995 "To imagine what it means to be another human being is an act of love. These are poems written by a great lover of the world. Everything in it that stands alone, unobserved, and luminous. Solitary people with their solitary destinies...If there's a native, archetypical American solitude, Louis Jenkins has given us its flavor."--Charles Simic, The Boston Review

Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Antiques & Collectibles

Several of these poems are included in the performance script of NICE FISH, the play.

Just Above Water: Prose Poems

Words and Pictures

Will o' the Wisp Books

A collection of poems by renowned poet Louis Jenkins. Louis Jenkins' poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. He has published 12 collections of his poetry. He was awarded two Bush Foundation Fellowships for poetry, a Loft-McKnight fellowship, and was the 2000 George Morrison Award winner. Louis Jenkins has read his poetry on A Prairie Home Companion and was a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996 and at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Aldeburgh, England in 2007. The play, Nice Fish, based on Jenkins' poems, a collaboration with Mark Rylance, was nominated for an Olivier Award, Best New Comedy in 2017.

The Mad Moonlight: poems

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Collected Poems

Louis Jenkins has been charming readers with his subtle, curious, cantankerous, and Quixotic prose poems for decades. It might be late-night ruminations about the plumbing, a bear wandering aimlessly downtown, a fishing lure so grotesque it couldn't possibly attract a fish, a row of spindly poplars in a field, or a visit to long-lost relatives in Norway. Given any situation or observation, Jenkins will follow the thread until it peters out, then veers in an entirely new but strangely logical direction, arriving, in the end, at some new, unexpected, and often hilarious truth. In Where Your House Is Now, Jenkins has combined the best of his earlier work with an entirely new set of poems that make it clear he has not lost his knack for uncovering the mysterious and bizarre beneath the quotidian experiences of Minnesota life.

Where Your House Is Now: New and Selected Prose Poems

Nodin Press

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Books by Jenkins, Louis