Louis Jenkins has been charming readers with his subtle, curious, cantankerous, and Quixotic prose poems for decades. It might be late-night ruminations about the plumbing, a bear wandering aimlessly downtown, a fishing lure so grotesque it couldn’t possibly attract a fish, a row of spindly poplars in a field, or a visit to long-lost relatives in Norway. Given any situation or observation, Jenkins will follow the thread until it peters out, then veers in an entirely new but strangely logical direction, arriving, in the end, at some new, unexpected, and often hilarious truth. In Where Your House Is Now, Jenkins has combined the best of his earlier work with an entirely new set of poems that make it clear he has not lost his knack for uncovering the mysterious and bizarre beneath the quotidian experiences of Minnesota life.

Louis Jenkins’ poems have appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. He has published ten collections of poetry. He was awarded two Bush Foundation Fellowships for poetry, a Loft-McKnight fellowship, and was the 2000 George Morrison Award winner. Mr. Jenkins has read his poetry on A Prairie Home Companion and was a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996 and at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Aldeburgh, England in 2007.

A play, Nice Fish, based on his poems, premiered April 6, 2013, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. A revised version was performed at American Repertory Theater in Boston (Jan-Feb 2016) where, thanks to Academy Award-winning actor Mark Rylance and Claire Van Kampen, Mr. Jenkins got a chance to attempt acting. It was a short-lived career. The play later opened at The Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End, where it ran until February 12, 2017. In March 2017 Nice Fish was nominated for an Olivier award as Best New Comedy of 2017.