Description

A Bit Left of Straight Ahead

by Kim Peter Kovac

A Bit Left of Straight Ahead is an exploration—a journey within journey—born from Kim Peter Kovac’s eclectic knowledge and his free-form imagination. The poems are inhabited by poets, painters, musicians, action figures, fairy tale characters, myths, historical persons, who venture across time and geography to places such as Andalusia, Romania, Robben Island, Sarajevo, Wadi Rum, Okinawa, and Saturn.

Kovac has created a tapestry of magical realism, time-shifts, stylistic variety, and non-linearity that is woven with interludes of humor, philosophy, whimsy, and music. His poems explore reconciliation through communion with the past; critique notions of mental health, war, and “othering” people; and cast a quirky yet truthful eye on the zeitgeist.

 

Enjoy a Video of Kim reading from the book:

Early Praise for A Bit Left of Straight Ahead:

A Bit Left of Straight Ahead is an act of neural cartography; a vibrant creative force mapped through poetic thought experiments, dioramas, epistolaries, researched history, and ekphrasis. Kim Peter Kovac proves equally adept at leading us into dialogue with genius ancestors—Li Bai, Jorge Luis Borges, Abbas ibn Firnas—and his more intimate forebears, such as an Army Air Corps master sergeant who dreams of home while he supervises the repair of WWII fighter planes. There is always a spark to Kovac’s work that seems cheeky and meta, as when The Arabian gazelle standing near the hoopoe taking a sand-bath knows he’s extinct and wonders if writing a ghazal to the glimmer in his ghazalah’s eyes will allow him to run again. This is a delightful, sprawling collection that rewards being read many times over.

—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode

Masterful for its panoramic humanity and theatrically charged verbal wit, A Bit Left of Straight Ahead is a glorious collection of lyrical verse. “knifeknifeknife” is mind-bogglingly imaginative as are the pantheon of pop art icons and fairy tale characters woven in mixed tapes and epistolary verses that gracefully bring the book together with Kovac’s signature eloquent absurdity.

—Regie Cabico, Nuyoircan Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion, author of A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex

A Bit Left of Straight Ahead, Kim Peter Kovac’s new imaginative and singular collection, mixes genres, ancient syllabic sounds, and takes the reader on magical musings through many a threshold between asleep / and awake, to experience percussive, lyrical worlds.

—Hélène Cardona, award-winning author of Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves

Kim Peter Kovac meditates, looks deep, remembers, carefully constructs, line by line, breaking them in just the right places. Sun Ra and Borges, the wind and the world of ordinary things are connected with thoughtful artistry. A Bit Left of Straight Ahead provides new angles on that which I thought I’d seen, including even my own memories.

—Idris Goodwin, Breakbeat poet & playwright

In his second collection, Kim Peter Kovac takes us through poetic forms from Andalusia, Tel Aviv, Lower Manhattan, and the psych ward. Kovac inhabits what it means to be human in the spaces in between, with an athletic range spanning from the lyrical essay to the tercet to the list to the persona, all of which examine history and personal concerns. A shoulder calls to its dead body. Van Gogh compiles a mix tape where he confesses insecurities about his greatest work. The dead speak in the tongues of Basho and Brecht. Marie Curie falls in love with radium. No matter what, please steep yourself in these poems and the liminal, limitless spaces they offer.

—Maria Nazos, author of PULSE (forthcoming, Omnidawn 2026), translator of The Slow Horizon that Breathes

There’s a threshold between asleep and awake, where the dark and still becomes the dark and walking.

And thus starts Kim Peter Kovac’s epic journey around the world, through time and into outer space and back to the liminal place between life and death. Kovac paints a world with an existential lesson in a FedEx delivery of a “Borges action figure”; where a son smokes a cigarette with his dead father; where Chagall and Breughel experience 9/11; and where a couple and their dog survive the crash that upturns their world.

Kovac is a master of finding where the mundane and the magical converge. He builds homes for prophets, painters, and mechanics alike. He gives license to traumatized fairy tale characters to confront their creators. A bundle of contradictions and different dictions, Kim Peter Kovac is an American poet that finds his true language in the streets of dusty countries that are not his own, and in imaginary places that exist everywhere.

This is a scrap book of a man’s soul beating to the most eclectic song list you can imagine. One that we want to hear again and again. A treasure.

—Karen Zacarias, playwright, author of Native Gardens and Destiny of Desire

About the Author

Kim Peter Kovac began writing poetry in 2012, toward the end of his career in national and international theater for young audiences (TYA), starting work on his first Poetry Barn asynchronous online workshop on the plane home from a festival in Okinawa, just barely beating a typhoon.

He has commissioned and produced 100+ new TYA plays and musicals as Artistic Director of Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, including from Pulitzer Prize and Tony award winning playwrights and composers.

Kim co-founded and co-produced (with Deirdre Kelly Lavrakas) the Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices, an award-winning program that assisted in the development of 111 new plays, musicals, and operas from 97 playwrights and 38 composers, working with 61 U.S. and 12 international theater companies. He spent 12 years on the governing board of ASSITEJ, the international TYA association, with national centers in 80+ countries, and currently works as part of the leadership team and webmaster for Write Local Play Global, the international network for writers of new work for young audiences, with members in 50+ countries.

Kim’s first poetry collection, Border Sounds: Poem & Dispatches from Other Timezones, was published in January 2021. He also has 150+ pieces in print and online in journals from Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the USA.  He has a BA in Theatre from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

Website: kimpeterkovac.com
Twitter: @kimpeterkovac
Threads: kimpeterkovac06