Kiss the Heathens

a book of poetry by Canadian author Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Evergreen Review, Red Fez, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Blue Collar Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.

"Movie stars, birds, lizards, muggers, and sharks in an alphabet milkshake. Ryan comes out with haymakers and steel-toed boots. Crescendos, bombs, fuck you corvettes, and elevator men.

The Mighty Quinn is from Ontario, Canada; where bears drive trucks and eat beaver meatloaf. I recommend this book; Ry is widely published. Since Bukowski is gone and my friend, Lyn Lifshin; I think Flanagan will become and deserves to be top wrangler on the small press ranch."--Catfish McDaris, 1-26-23

"Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a twisted bastard and I love it. His poetry is funnier than most. And it's the dark kind. Is it ironic that gallows humor gives me pangs of nostalgia for the nineties when people didn't give a fuck? This poet still doesn't. I find his acid tongue refreshing, Scenes of cynics, surly saints, the lost and lonely; Kiss the Heathens reports from the front lines of a working class world where the punchlines make painful points, and only a smirk can save your sanity."-Westley Heine, author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician & Squatter

"The moments in Kiss the Heathens are grounded in the incidents of life-good or bad-but sprinkled with imagined insanity, so they feel real, even when they aren't. "She seems to know I don't have it in me,/staying in the room where her ex-husband used/to beat her for $49/night,/the nice couple that own the place/imploring us to pet their dying cone-headed dog/as they hand us the key." It's as though Flanagan takes us with him around town-to a pet store, a hotel, a gas station, a restaurant or its dishroom-and all the while he's sign-posting what he makes of it all, with a teasing economy of language. "Of course I believe in god. I have a cat, don't I?""-Kerry Trautman, author of Unknowable Things