About My Nephew:- Kenny McFadden BY I.p.s.y (M.O.H) editor Mr Geoff Martin You probably haven't met many people like my nephew Kenny McFadden. He's complicated, unconventional, untamed. People with ordinary lives talk about living on the edge as if they knew what that meant but when it comes to traversing the margins, he's the real deal. If Tom Waits and Patti Smith had a love child, it could be him. And he's talented, but not in any way you could imagine or maybe even understand. And so he's written this book, Powerless Prisoners. At first sight a rambling, loosely connected mantra that pays little attention to basic properties such as punctuation , morphology or common idioms, but which scatters pearls of perfection across its pages as effortlessly and as randomly as the wind scatters the seeds. His prose echoes Joyce on a good day, Dunleavy on a bad one, Heaney when his mind is on tilling the soil, Bolano when he's clean, Bolano when he's not. Kenny doesn't or can't write with their demeanour, composure, discipline, never could and never will, but he writes and he writes from his heart and soul and if you take the time and the trouble to look, and look, then there amid the literary chaos and the utter rejection of convention, you will find strands of gold, and that's good enough for me. Powerful Prisoners seeks to set the captive free. You might be confused, but she'd your inhibitions and you might be mesmerised. And it's a while since I've been mesmerised. GEOFFRY