SPAM is delighted to announce the publication of fred spoliar's long-anticipated book With The Boys, out on August 14. The book is available to pre-order from the SPAM shop.
An online launch event will be held on August 12, featuring readings from fred spoliar, Brandon Brown, Ali Graham, Rhiannon Auriol and Verity Spott. The event is free but a ticket must be booked here.
Praise for With The Boys:
This is a hissing trash fire of a book. A less vigilant reader may be tempted to defang this work, to label it ‘surreal’, to think of it as the inert confession of an individual, so as to safely relegate it to the realms of bourgeois aesthetic sensibility. Such a reading is unforgivable. The writing here is powerfully alert, transfixing the quotidian horror of casualised contracts, landlording and austerity. But spoliar refuses despair. No line break, or phrase, capitulates to what is expected of it. Lyric’s self-deferential affect is gleefully inverted: the masculine confessional, the ‘man-cave of tenderness’, with all its attendant contradictions and mealy-mouthed violence, ripped apart; as is gender itself: ‘doesn’t it / feel like something ending’, our speaker asks gloomily, or joyously, or both. This is communist poetry, communist poetry that’s queer as fuck. Come on, ‘be raised into crisis with the boys’: fred spoliar is the best around. - Al Anderson
By turns outraged and outrageous, dismissed and dismissive, hilarious and smouldering, fred spoliar’s With the Boys survives the boys and offers a palette for how we might do the same, embedded as we are with the boys inevitably, desperate as we are to try and be beyond them. I love this book. - Brandon Brown
Breaking the perspex with the boys, fred’s poems are a citational undoing of the ceaseless materialisations of labour, gender, weather that accumulate on the exhausted lyric body. In their place, they offer us another berth; a natural history after nature. They counterwrite for the pluriform conditions of livable worlds. Aleatory without cruelty; flourishing without curtailment. - Fred Carter
In this sly, inviting, complex love poem, fred spoliar captures the absurdity of being a subject, then seems to melt ‘the boys’ with a laser, concept and matter at once. Plays on sound and association turn a world of service work and buzz cuts inside out, reaching for another one, imperceptible and thrilling. Capital is an orchestra, a 'madding in me,' always both here and elsewhere, suffocating but ultimately weak. So 'where E is in fact shit,' it really is, because E, like everything else in this beautiful work, is not rendered sacred but historical and changeable. Dare to do more than dream! - Amy De'Ath
fred spoliar was born in London. Magazine publications include DATABLEED, Erotoplasty, Tentacular, Pigs zine, SPAM zine, Adjacent Pineapple and amberflora. With the Boys is their first full-length book.
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