Richard Kenney is the best local poet you've probably never heard of. But this guy is the real deal. He won a MacArthur "genius" grant for inventing new ways to create and pattern rhymes. That's right. Before Kenney started writing (and writing about writing, a speciality of his), we had fewer ways to find rhymes, which is one of the major food groups in poetry. If that's all he did, he'd deserve your full attention for at least one evening. But he's also given the world several books of poetry that are worth keeping close by. Using syntax to probe science, and diving deep into the evolutionary origins of language, Kenney refreshes the language that daily dies in our mouths, and he brushes the dust off old feelings like joy and love so that we can feel them again as if for the first time. by Rich Smith