In September we publish a groundbreaking anthology of collaborative poetry by the experimental writer SJ Fowler. Enemies is the result of collaborations with over thirty artists, photographers and writers – each imbued with the energy, innovation and generosity of spirit that has become Fowler’s calling card as a poet. You can find out more about […]
In September we publish a groundbreaking anthology of collaborative poetry by the experimental writer SJ Fowler. Enemies is the result of collaborations with over thirty artists, photographers and writers – each imbued with the energy, innovation and generosity of spirit that has become Fowler’s calling card as a poet. You can find out more about the wider Enemies project.
Enemies: The Selected Collaborations will be launched on Friday 25 October at Toynbee Studios, London E1, with readings by Fowler & collaborators.
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November sees three new collections: two second books and one debut.
Melissa Lee-Houghton‘s Beautiful Girls is a raw and challenging account of mental illness, and together with her debut, A Body Made of You, establishes her reputation as one of the most powerful new voices in British poetry. Chris McCabe describes it as ‘not a book for the feint-hearted. The reader has been invited to a sleepover at the asylum, a night in which five-year old girls drift alone through the wards, where the mentally unstable do sit-ups when nobody is watching and where heaven is a place between “the sky and the planets” reserved for those with personality disorders.’
‘None of this is the city. All of it is you,’ writes Siddhartha Bose in Digital Monsoon. In this follow-up to his acclaimed debut Kalagora, Bose proposes the poet as a twenty-first century beatnik, a ravenous language machine eating up the margins of the city. Dreams trigger extraordinary visions of an apocalyptic London populated by technologised bodies; beat-boxers and graffiti writers as urban oracles; the ghosts of a multicultural city moving through banks and brothels, kebab shops and squat parties.
Forms of Protest collects together for the first time the work of Hannah Silva, a poet and playwright known for her fearless and wholly original vocal performances. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world. Ranging in form from sound poems to collaged spam email, from monologues to lists of insults, and embracing subjects as diverse as war, sexuality and giant squid, Silva’s poetry is like nothing else you’ve read.
Beautiful Girls, Digital Monsoon and Forms of Protest will be officially launched on Thursday 14 November at Toynbee Theatre, London E1, and at events across the country in November and December.