Overview

Kevin Hart's Carnets presents six hundred one-line poems written over twenty-six years. Sometimes aphoristic, sometimes lyrical, and sometimes fragmentary, these poems touch on almost every aspect of human life, from nature to God, from pain to joy, from the sensual to the mysterious. These are poems you will want to commit to memory, to quote to friends and family, and sometimes to live by.

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Reviews

""Carnets is not a notebook in any conventional sense. Rather, this collection of aphorisms is a great firefly filled with sparks, exploding and scattering in forever new and unexpected perceptions and revelations. This is a book that should be kept on hand for when the world appears dull or depressing. Its incisive, sometimes ruthless, unnerving, stimulating and unpredictable insights will always challenge and enlighten."" --Andrew Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Creative Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Australia ""With these glimpses, glances, snatches, squints, blinks, wells, catches, roots, tastes, and pinpricks, Kevin Hart delivers the cutting edge of more than fifty years of poetry (1974-2025). A unified existence that, from philosophy to literature and Christianity, reveals a renewed and creative way of seeing the world."" --Emmanuel Falque, Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, Catholic University of Paris ""A carnet is a notebook--one thinks of Levinas and Camus--but it is also a customs permit for crossing a frontier. Each of Kevin Hart's marvelous aphorisms, gnomic and piquant, witty and lyrical, offers the wisdom of provocation. 'The bigger the truth, the fewer the words, ' he writes. Then, as if to prove it: 'Loss is the boss.' There are fine insights into poetry: 'To write one line, one must forget many books.' And faith: 'God calls us home where we have never been.' And dailiness: 'Salt life with death--just enough.' Carnets is the work of fifty years, and I imagine it will last as long as people read."" --David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems ""In this series of one-sentence poems that shift between question, declaration, lyric and aphorism, Kevin Hart brings a weight of experience, curiosity and clarity to the life of the body embedded in the life of the spirit. As they move between the quotidian and the visionary, these tiny, durable poems flash with insight and astonishment."" --Toby Martinez de las Rivas, author of Floodmeadow ""At once evocative and elusive, Hart's poetic aphorisms pull you deeper into earthly experience in all its fleshy phenomenality only to push you over the edge into a bottomless well of bracing ideas. Savor one a day as 'espresso for the soul' and by the time you get to the end you'll want to start over with new eyes for the patterns they weave. 'Some trees carve their names in our heart' so too will some of the stunning one-liners in Hart's Carnets."" --Kate Rigby, author of Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction ""Hart distils entire worlds in a mere handful of words. Lurking in these ecstatic fragments is a lifetime's worth of beauty and pain, wisdom and foolishness, body and spirit, gravity and levity. In Carnets, we see how Hart can be trusted with very little and so can also be trusted with much."" --Jaya Savige, author of Change Machine ""Kevin Hart's Carnets reduces the aphoristic to its purest, most concentrated essence. The result is a series of intense, momentary pleasures, singular in their momentary realization, universal in their inexhaustible variety."" --John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Author Information

Kevin Hart is the author of ten collections of poems, most recently Firefly (2026), along with several editions of selected poems, including Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (2015). His poetry has won a wide range of awards. He teaches in the Divinity School at Duke University.

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