Robert Lee Kendrick grew up in Illinois and Iowa, but now calls South Carolina home. After earning his M.A. from Illinois State University and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, he held a number of jobs, ranging from house painter to pizza driver to grocery store worker to line cook. He now lives in Clemson with his wife, and their dog. His poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Literature, The Cape Rock, and elsewhere.

Books by Robert Lee Kendrick:

Other poems on the web by Robert Lee Kendrick:
Three poems
"Tasks"
"Spore"

About What Once Burst With Brilliance:

"What Once Burst with Brilliance, by Robert Lee Kendrick, is an apt title for a book with so much shimmer. These poems are achingly elegiac—a deep, unslaked yearn for a past not vanished, but resurrected through the time-honored autobiographical 'I' of the eye-witness dutifully chained to memory, distilling his only life in a series of beautifully sonic psalm-like meditations. Kendrick's poems are at once documentary and unforgettably imagined. Their pervasive narrative drive streams with revelatory blinding diction and ghosts that pass through walls 'to slip free from gravity's hold / & rise / as columns of smoke.' What a fine book."
—Joseph Bathanti

"Robert Lee Kendrick's poems balance a roistering in the language of youth and speed and aftermarket parts catalogues—the 'glasspacks, blower stacks, piston rings & every oil soaked thing' and a motorcycle grown 'from twisted / black bones to a chrome and red dragon'—with a supplication to the sometimes slick, sometimes sticky rummaging of sounds and sights in the backwoods and creeks and the mutterings we find to measure their natures: the 'rock-roughened slurry' and the '[w]hip-chinned and dour-mouthed [who] share their grim / wisdom.' Kendrick teaches us that in these moments of restoration and reinvention, in these imaginings of what something is and can be, we find connections. We find ourselves."
—Adam Vines