Kevin Ridgeway

"Kevin Ridgeway has a hammer in his soul and he uses it to bang out hard truths dealing with a broken childhood, staggered adulthood, psych ward stays, bleak street scenes, lessons in sin from a soon to be incarcerated father, a desperate mother failing to leave behind the man who always continues to break her heart. All this Ridgeway lays out with lines flying down the page, perhaps the only way such nightmare hours should be recorded. We all know the world is a chaotic ride. This book won't necessarily help you figure out how to better maneuver through it, but it will make you come alive with wider eyes, sharper vision. Reading Ridgeway is a pleasure born of pain. The world within these pages, forged in the language of scars, is well worth falling into." Michael Flanagan Author of, Days Like These and, A Million Years Gone"Kevin Ridgeway's work bubbles with pain, humor, terror, and love. Invasion of the Shadow People is not simply a collection of poems-but rather a beating heart that will not be stopped." --Mathieu Cailler, author of the poetry collections May I Have This Dance and Catacombs of the Heart

Poems from and about motels, hotels, and motor inns from NY to LA and beyond, by Kevin Ridgeway and James H Duncan. Published by Alpine Ghost Press."...by the end of its days the motel housed only the suffering and the burned-out, the addicts, the broken, the poor, and lost, and after a fire that too disappeared, as all things do in time."

Kevin Ridgeway was raised in Whittier, CA. He has lived in New York City, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. He attended Goddard College but abandoned his studies for a failed early marriage, followed by several lost years suffering from untreated bipolar disorder during which time he embarked on a drunken public library and used book store self education with silent movies playing on his t.v. set and old school rock n roll grooving from his turntable. He began contributing to the small, independent and underground presses in 2010, and has remained prolifc ever since. He is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. A two-time Pushcart Prize and two-time Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.