Steak & Stations reports from a landscape of contrasts and contradictions: of speed and consumption, haute cuisine and isolated railway platforms; from nocturnal inner-city encounters to rural wildernesses where schoolgirls ‘climb into the wind’… In this exhilarating debut collection, Michael Egan has developed a style of his own, a conversational staccato that compels you to reconstruct his dark, fragmented micro-narratives piece by piece. Shot through with surreal humour, experimentation and a keen political sensibility, these poems offer a peep-hole into the mysteries of domesticity, relationships and modern society.
In Kalagora, the dazzling debut collection by Indian-born poet Siddhartha Bose, the cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, New York and London are transformed into sites of fractured vision. Bose has created a volatile, dynamic poetics in which love and longing compete with the hybrid, multicultural cityscape. A five-part structure reflects this multiplicity: ‘Prolectric’ and ‘Epilepsis’ book-end sequences on childhood and initiation (’Sunya’), love (’Maya’) and the city (‘Nagri’). Kalagora is a Hindi neologism meaning black man / white man; this book tells his story.
Wednesday 1 December, 8pm
The Poetry Library
Southbank Centre
London SE1 8XX
0844 847 9910
Free entry
