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Things To Do Before You Leave Town
Ross Sutherland
Attempt to tessellate everything
you’ve never wanted
and ever known.
Cut the phone. Bleed the radiators.
from ‘Things To Do Before You Leave Town’
Featured on BBC Newsnight Review
Mono-browed cousins, clandestine paperboys, murderous action heroes and Swiss euthanasia clinics jostle for position in Ross Sutherland’s intelligent and wildly entertaining debut collection of poetry.
Sutherland charts the never-ending urban excursions of Pac-Man; constructs mash-ups of celebrity obits; and dons a surgical mask to conduct an ‘Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love’. Things To Do Before You Leave Town is a sharp, ambitious and blackly comic exploration of the end of things, where ‘all the roads that lead out are really leading back in’.
Review quotes
‘In his free-wheeling lyricism, caustic wit and brilliantly surreal turn of image, Sutherland is a truly contemporary original. His poetry rejuvenates techniques as disparate as collage, memoir, sound experiment and formal appropriation in vigorous but finely wrought lines. Refreshingly fearless and bleakly funny, Things To Do Before You Leave Town collects works that shock and delight in performance but reveal their true depth on the page.’
Luke Kennard
‘Giving expression to those spaces between metaphor and meaning and the journey from belonging to loss and back again. An amazing collection that gives a voice to those who have felt the need to throw frisbees of the highest point in town.’
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Ross Sutherland was born Edinburgh in 1979. A former lecturer in electronic literature at Liverpool John Moore’s University, Ross now works as a freelance journalist and as a tutor in creative writing. He was one of The Times’ Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. Ross’s poems have been published in Rising, Reactions, Orbis, Mercy, Tears in the Fence, The Fix and NME. He co-edited the new writing anthology Rock/text (Pen & Inc, 2002). A founding member of Aisle16, Ross has co-written eight live literature productions, including the critically acclaimed Poetry Boyband and Found in Translation. Ross makes regular appearances at Manchester Literature Festival, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Glastonbury, Latitude Festival, Port Eliot Literary Festival and venues around the UK. He’s completed solo tours of Switzerland and Germany, during which the Basel Zeitgung described him as “strömschnellen”. He is reliably informed that this has something to do with white water rafting.
Things To Do Before You Leave Town - Ross Sutherland
Published 9.01.09 by Penned in the Margins
£6.99, 64 pages
ISBN 978-0-9553846-4-6
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