Carnets

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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