You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.
'What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.' After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination. The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester's irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures. It is also a stunning first novel from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.
Ed Luker's Other Life is an acerbic and intelligent collection with heaps of personality. Luker's poems show an interest in the inner riddles of poetic form coupled with desperate attempts to navigate the insane demands of modern life, including £3 pound sausage rolls, yoga and the plains of Calabria. These complicated pressures push Luker into riotous protest. Other Life pushes against a certain shyness in contemporary poetry, replacing it with megalomaniac verve and sparkle.
An illustrated exploration of fandom that combines academic essays with artist pages and experimental texts. Fandom as Methodology examines fandom as a set of practices for approaching and writing about art. The collection includes experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. Key to the idea of “fandom as methodology” is a focus on the potential for fandom in art to create oppositional spaces, communities, and practices, particularly from queer perspectives, but also through transnational, feminist and artist-of-color fandoms. The book provides a range of examples of artists and writers working in this vein, as well as academic essays...
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 'Fizzing with insistent energy . . . full of crystalline images and metaphors . . . Frears is excellent on sexual politics, the end of girlhood' Guardian Ella Frears's debut is a collection of wry, vivid poems whose power lies in their intimacy. They are as insistent as they are circumspect, drawing close to the reader's ear and bringing them into confidence. The engine of Shine, Darling is one of strength, of fortitude in confronting and surviving the world, of a lifted-chin audacity - 'There was pain,' the speaker allows, 'but it was not new pain...
This book is open access under a CC BY license. This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest’s presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributio...
'Hiller offers extraordinary resilience and moments of immense, liberatory tenderness. [...] This is a harrowing book, yes, but ultimately, with its invitation to “billow forth the wrecks we hold”, with its emphasis on resistance and joy, it is a staggeringly beautiful piece of life-affirming work.' Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Poetry Review
In 1996, Reality Street published Out of Everywhere, the first anthology of its kind of innovative poetry by women in North America and the British Isles. Here, 20 years later, is the long-awaited follow-up, including the following 44 poets: Sascha Akhtar, Amy De'Ath, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Andrea Brady, Lee Ann Brown, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Mairead Byrne, Jennifer Cooke, Corina Copp, Emily Critchley, Jean Day, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Carrie Etter, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Heather Fuller, Susana Gardner, Susan Gevirtz, Elizabeth James/Frances Presley, Lisa Jarnot, Christine Kennedy, Myung Mi Kim, Frances Kruk, Francesca Lisette, Sophie Mayer, Carol Mirakove, Marianne Morris, Erin Moure, Jennifer Moxley, Redell Olsen, Holly Pester, Vanessa Place, Sophie Robinson, Lisa Samuels, Kaia Sand, Susan M Schultz, Eleni Sikelianos, Zoe Skoulding, Juliana Spahr, Elizabeth Treadwell, Catherine Wagner, Carol Watts, Sara Wintz, Lissa Wolsak. A limited-edition CD of audio work by nine of these poets accompanies this anthology, and is available for sale separately, exclusively from the Reality Street website while stocks last."
Have a nice weekend I think you're interesting is a collection of poetry about hometowns and distance. It considers relationships, anxieties and sincerity, and is obsessed with hypothetical mothers in law, knitwear and being liked on the internet.
Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Featuring Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest and many more. * A Guardian Best Poetry Book of the Year * * Shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards * Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, La...