KL7 - Richard Capener

“Like playing Portal with the metaphysics of the sentence, KL7  questions the stakes of gameplay within speech itself. What does it mean ‘to be bound’, ‘to be broken’? How to navigate ‘the permeability of social space’ within the ‘erotic’ dissolves of ‘repetition’? Capener’s coiling sequence strings atomised goal-seekers, lyric utterance and philosophical fragments within the linguistic residue of ‘the empty room’ of the poem you’re reading. Absence/presence in ‘the shame / of a collective noun’ is always to risk speaking in the echo of others, and yet in that shame to ask or demand what ‘cut[s] the world’ even as we offer our desire to the actual, tracing ‘the edge of language’ in all its frictions. As Ponge studied the sensual insistence of orange, here the speaker experiences ‘a purge of general publics’ in the wild ‘yellow of haddock’, its specificity delicious as the phrase ‘That’s it’. “
Maria Sledmere

“Richard Capener’s KL7 is a pamphlet that disrupts convention by demonstrating the power of the gaps in between words, as much as the words themselves. Capener explores the liminal space between reader and writer, peering through a literary fourth wall, creating a perfect poetic dissonance.”
Aaron Kent