(LAUNCH) capriccio, by Daisy Lafarge

SPAM Press are delighted to announce the publication of Daisy Lafarge’s new poetry pamphlet, capriccio. 

Please join us for a double launch of capriccio and SPAM editor Maria Sledmere’s new pamphlet, nature sounds without nature sounds (Sad Press, 2019) at Good Press, Glasgow on 25th September. 

The launch will feature readings from: 

☀️ Eloise Birtwhistle

☀️ Aniela Piasecka

☀️ Maria Sledmere 

☀️ Daisy Lafarge

Cover design by Ane Lopez

Praise for capriccio: 

‘In the trompe l’oeil city’ of Daisy Lafarge’s capriccio, everything is the possible trace of something else, disappearing at the edge of elliptical event. Her aphoristic lines contain a shifting geometry of strange labelling, surreal imagery and simultaneous occurrence, where people assemble without faces, ‘Foreign messages arrive, interpolated by emojis’ and desire is a slide between tenses. Capriccio, meaning both a lively, free-form piece of music and a form of visual art depicting a fantasy or hybrid of real/imagined features, is alive in the form and content of Lafarge’s beautiful poetic caper. There is a constant meta push and tug with the telling of this world, or any world — ‘I can only tell you the half of it’ — and a kind of theatrical insouciance towards the question of narrative, being and place altogether: ‘A brief interlude on someone else’s channel’. Like the ‘Animals in a revolving door’, the reader might find herself in a kind of carousel slide projector, trying to parse the seams of ‘reality’ from Lafarge’s irresistible, flickering images. This is a book full of animals, objects, forests, memories, exotica, weather and text; a book about the material conditions for art, about everyday metamorphosis, taste, about lyric ontology and the affective, somatic charge therein — ‘A hop-skip-jump of recollection’. 

— Maria Sledmere, SPAM Poetry Editor, and author of nature sounds without nature sounds

capriccio wakes up in tricks and ploys too early and too late, improvising on the runway pulled from underneath us. The book’s stuttered feeds latch on shocks of counterfactual pleasure, joy, and rage, gathering the newsy torrent of wrong posts and messages from the so-called outside into an oblique momentum all its own. ‘A text you wanted – didn’t want – to arrive, arrives.’: lines like plane debris dispersed wide and far through the disaster and the aftermath of capital, a Cheshire grin on every face. I’m listening in these earphones when out of the corner of my eye I spy a mystic or a fool, reaching for a social life.  

— Dom Hale, MOTE editor and author of Time Zone, Solar Panel

Daisy Lafarge’s capriccio is a beautiful, hilarious, hallucinatory folly. Like all truly fresh poems, it ‘snacks on itself’ in order to sustain its vision of ‘luminous babies’, ‘tesserae of zucchini’, ‘sea urchin nipple tassels’, and the many other news items ‘rocky perception’ brings us. It poses past and present selves for an awkward family portrait in front of the dehiscent green screen of the future, with captions like: ‘Achieving climate zen.’ After reading it I was left with a feeling of great doubt as to what a poem is. Snit snit!

— Oli Hazzard, author of Blotter

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Bios for Readers: 

Eloise Birtwhistle is a poet and writer currently exploring the evasive and direct ways that we strive to communicate in the environment of physical and mental ill health. She has been selected for publication by New Writing Scotland, From Glasgow to Saturn and Reclaim: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry. 

Aniela Piasecka was born in Glasgow and currently lives and works there. Often working within collaborative and interdisciplinary contemporary artistic contexts, elements of her practice include dance, the expanded field of performance, film, text and installation.

Maria Sledmere is working towards a DFA in anthropocene aesthetics at the University of Glasgow. She is a member of A+E Collective, freelance music journalist, Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for SPAM Press, Poetry Editor at Dostoyevsky Wannabe and founding editor of Gilded Dirt. Her new pamphlet, nature sounds without nature sounds, follows two other poetry publications: Existential Stationary and lana del rey playing at a stripclub. 

Daisy Lafarge is a writer and artist based in Glasgow. understudies for air was published by Sad Press in 2017, and a collection of poetry and a novel are forthcoming.

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Launch starts at 7pm. Free entry. 

capriccio will be available to order here very soon. 

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Banner design by Finn Arschavir and Ane Lopez

Published 19/9/19

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