Saturday 8 September, 7.30pm till late
47/49 Tanner Street
London SE1 3PL
Nearest tubes: London Bridge, Bermondsey
Join independent literary press Penned in the Margins to celebrate the launch of futuristic scifi mystery HOLOPHIN, the debut novella by award-winning poet Luke Kennard. Luke is joined by special guest Ross Sutherland, launching his new collection of poems Emergency Window.
This very special double-launch-party-literary-extravaganza is hosted by the generous people at 47/49, a massive converted Victorian warehouse near Tower Bridge. (Used by TV show Dragons’ Den.)
Doors will open at 7.30pm, with readings by Luke and Ross at around 8.30pm. There will be a cash bar.
Entry is free but you must RSVP to info@pennedinthemargins.co.uk by 1 September.
It is 2031 and the must-have gadget is the Holophin: a tiny, dolphin-shaped microprocessor which cures your worst impulses and phobias, comforts you in your grief or boredom and makes everything look much, much prettier. Hatsuka and Max are students at the esteemed Takin International School, a learning institute so magnificent it produces Holophins as a by-product of its coursework projects. The billionth device has just been sold, but when Takin’s best students are stalked by a shady rival manufacturer, Holophin’s monopoly, and the narrative itself, begins to unravel – with unexpected consequences.
This hallucinatory and darkly funny sci-fi mystery is the debut novella by acclaimed poet Luke Kennard, a refracted meditation on identity, technology and the imagination.
Welcome to a science fiction reality of mirrors, windows and menacing simulacra – where nothing is as it seems. In this ambitious and long-awaited second full collection, Sutherland interrogates the language of authenticity, presenting the poet as an anxious, disorientated collaborator trapped in a world of hacked computers and digital avatars.
Emergency Window features new poems alongside excerpts from two recent sequences, including a hilarious and strangely prescient version of Little Red Riding Hood, a poem written using Google Streetview, sonnets inspired by the Street Fighter 2 video game, and a sequence of computer-generated translations of classic literature. Surreal, funny, intelligent and experimental, these poems chart a search for meaning in a disintegrating world.
