🍰 ⋆ 🎀 【ＳＰＡＭ Ｐｒｅｓｓ ｐｒｅｓｅｎｔｓ：
Ｄｅｅｐ Ｃｕｔｓ ２０２２】 🎀 ⋆ 🍰
It is a holiday tradition that SPAM brings you DEEP CUTS, our poetry picks of the year by SPAM editors, contributors and friends. This year's prime cuts feature work by poets and small presses across countries, timezones and hemispheres splayed out upon this endless fabric for little rats we call the internet. We're sure you will find new hits, overlooked gems and personal favourites within this big holiday hamper! Get ready to dive in and feel the irresistible urge to click away on Cargosites, PayPal links or send a gushing email asking for a PDF. Just don't forget to keep shouting from the rooftops about the poetry you love and what it does to you — the art remains happily fungible, not a token and something no-one (which means everyone) can own.
We're so grateful for your support throughout 2022, without which nothing we did could have been possible. We released our latest season of pamphlets, two peachy issues of our poetry magazine, began Brilliant Vibrating Interface — queer literary experiments in the spirit of our beloved experimental maverick multilingual Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, explored through the medium of workshops, podcasts and an upcoming anthology — and kept the Plaza whirring with fresh essays and reviews (and our new throwback / retrospective strand Archive Fever), along with new interviews and recordings of our live events on our podcast URL Sonata! Why not get a little holiday treat or our hit 'RAT POET' dad cap to finish off the year?
We have four previous years of DEEP CUTS for you to dig through, from 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Don't forget to play the hits!
Anthony Anaxagorou, Heritage Aesthetics (Granta)
‘the absence of a body is not the absence of memory’ writes Anaxagorou in Heritage Aesthetics, a book of bounding lyrical wanderings and wonderings. I read this book through the lens of an archipelagic poetics. No man is an island and, here, in these electric poems, Anaxagorou consistently overwrites the body of the map and of the human, deterritorialization then reterritorialization. That overlap allows for an ambitious reach into history and philosophy, allows for audacious and brilliant leaps of image and realities to collide. The voices of the colonial archive become ventriloquised: ‘don’t move / don’t say another fucking / thing,’ one poem demands of us. So we listen. Listen to the sonics of past archives and future ‘readymade’ ones. The relics and ruins of empire, nationalism, borders are beginning to crack and creak. Anaxagorou drags our bodies ‘back to the middle’ to watch it all happen. The middle of what? A bullseye territory where we reckon with heritages of the imperial project. ‘How will a body become seen’ in that indeterminate zone? To simultaneously critique and celebrate the capacity for language to deconstruct the given, to rewrite the borders of the over-determined diasporic subject and their aesthetics, and to do it with such vigour and intellectual generousness, this book is really remarkable.
— Jay Gao
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Mau Baiocco, The Resting Acrobats (Monitor)
The last time I read this pamphlet, a recurrent idiopathic wrench in my gut - which had pulsed like a livid hook for the entire journey between two cities - faded away. The Resting Acrobats moves through, with, out of and into such agonal states in the grid of things, the ‘packed and brittled’ parameters we loop through. It pushes against the harsh arcs and violent symmetries with guttering play, oiled anger, and grammatical blurts. Where the state and its borders and its public fountains are a house that ‘follows an infinite set of rules’, these poems skitter and slide, speakng toward a life ‘more than an intermittence of feelings’ without stitching ‘ethics to precarity’. And, bubbling amongst, are sweetly blurred oneiric rituals and revolutions: ‘I’m writing this so I hope you can / hear yourself in the night.’
— Jac Common
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Luc Bénazet and Jackqueline Frost (eds), Senna Hoy
The final issue of Senna Hoy, Jackqueline Frost’s bilingual little magazine, edited from Paris with Luc Bénazet, ought to have been met with laurels for the editors, garlands for the contributors, a solemn discussion of whether Wallace Stevens was right to say that French and English constitute a single language. Reading Senna Hoy you had the vital sense both of finding something out and of how much more there was and is to know. Yes. A serious magazine.
— Luke Roberts
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Emily Berry, Unexhausted Time (Faber)
Emily Berry plucks a phrase from the mind of Anne Carson as the generative pulse of this collection: ‘Attempts at description are stupid’ George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time.' The riddle-like expansiveness of Carson’s sentences and terms stay with me (I believe in the concept, yet am still puzzling it out), and Berry achieves this state of thought ongoingness throughout this ambivalent and swerving collection. In a suite of untitled fragments, prose poems, citational thought experiments, held within a long weaving lyric, Berry performs the ‘always-already’ sensation of writing, dreaming, longing, hurting. The language somehow manages to trace a fine and complex path between the abstract and the specific, the fantastical and the hyper-real, our dreamlife and everyday waking reality. The non-linear landscaping of the collection, alongside the echoes of other writers and thinkers, feels open, encouraging re-reading, releasing the words from a set time frame, even at times a set voice. Here is an eerie reflection of a dreamscape where time can fold inside itself, an unexhausted time that cannot be pinned down.
— Kirsty Dunlop
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Helen Boden, A Landscape to Figure In (Red Squirrel Books)
A welcome first collection from Helen Boden, seasoned blogger and organiser of writing groups. A Landscape to Figure In is as full of fecund form as you would expect from someone who carries a suitcase of techniques to encourage writing experiment. I enjoy Boden’s casual, informative voice, writing to us from a mid-age balance point with much living under the belt and knowledge to share of multiple intimate geographies. Places loved and people either still or no longer breathing within them connect like sketched itineraries or wished-for conversations across these poems – see the mutual friends and shared drams of the ‘Kirkibost’ prosepoem section of ‘Old Mortality’. Many poems build from engagement with Edinburgh’s cultural life. But there’s yearning to be both in and out of the bustle. In the ‘suburbia’ of 3 poems’ titles, the poet positions herself on the edge of a city she loves and on the edge of landscapes she loves. Her best solution to living in the best of all possible worlds comes to her when ‘Walking down to the Usher Hall / for a late-night recital, I try to envision / the distance as a single-track road, a Hebridean mile.’
— Iain Morrison
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Victoria Adukwei Buley, Quiet (Granta)
A rumination on works by the scholars Kevin Quashie, Saidiya Hartman and others, Quiet is a joy in how gracefully its thoughts move, the depth behind the stillness, the humour in the fury. There aren’t many books I want more people to read.
— Dave Coates
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Lucy Rose Cunningham, Interval: House, Lover, Slippages (Broken Sleep Books)
Lucy Rose Cunningham’s debut collection shifts about within the lockdown’s literal and psychological interior spaces. Linguistically gentle, I found it extremely comforting to read – particularly indoors on lamp-lit winter afternoons.
across phone signals we undress, exploring one another’s skin, pixelating blemishes lighting our screens.
Brimming with pleasing sounds and imagery, the text materialises across its pages in unexpected places with varying opacities that speak to quietude and newly noticed thoughts of the kind only time spent inside can reveal.
That said, it doesn’t shy away from more difficult subject matter, such as the vigil held for Sarah Everard. In 'The Vigil', repetition of its striking central image creates a sense of insistent protest, resulting in a deeply felt impact.
In the common, a host of lights cellophane wrapped roses souls seeking quiet with their sisters.
Reading almost like a series of lyrical journal entries, this intimate collection contains many relatable instances in time, though always through the poet’s personal lens. It looks very lovely too.
— Poppy Cockburn
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Cornell DeHuux, supreme so lavender runs (Irregularity, Catalogue)
In DeHuux’s thirteenth pamphlet the reader, ‘lux-corked / by every emissary / of the burgeoned moon’, finds themselves in a marred ecology, scarred philo-linguistics and (of course) the ‘neo-gated negotiations’ of Cardiff. From the title sequence and its bent chronologies elucidating ‘warped UBI affect’ and ‘cyber-Cymru-aporia’, to the hyper-pastoralism of ‘PUISSANCE (after Seán Vicary)’ and its fecund ‘eco-vocationality evoked of/f the superstructure-based sea’, these are poems jittery with ‘3am coffee / before I put my mother’s only baby to bed / in the calcified cot of ontic delay’. Just remember - the ‘glassy sea ejected via their holiest holly-wrung Holyhead ’ is but ‘the reflection from ‘the Capitacoece’s Saltmead’, and ‘fuck R.S. Thomas / but softly’. A pamphlet full of queer sestinas, perpendicular enjambment, simulacra, and simula-craic.
— Sebastian Groose
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Joe Devlin, Marginalia Drawings (Timglaset)
Joe Devlin is a formalist of some kind. His creative output consists of several ongoing series of obsessive variations on particular compositional motifs or formal constraints, often involving scavenging materials and detritus from public libraries. There is a series of framed dog-ears, for example, that have been removed from old books; folded glassine paper sculptures based on gatefold patterns; rough op-art compositions with waves and spirals of Letraset punctuation marks, and, most engaging of all, the Marginalia Drawings that are gathered together in this edition from Timglaset. You can find Devlin on Twitter or Instagram circulating this stuff with restless abandon whenever you feel like it, but it’s good to see the Malmö-based press giving this work the kind of inventive and illustrative physical presentation — like an old school workbook or portfolio — that it deserves. Each page consists, I think, of overlaid scans of all the double-spreads from a particular, multiply withdrawn volume. Then the typed text has been removed, leaving only the inserted scrawlings of generations of readers. There’s a curiously religious connotation to the void-diptych effect that this creates, and a beautiful impression of layered, greyscale scrawl that births little accidental renga-like constructions, composed by a Greek chorus — Derek Bealieu’s phrase in the introduction – of unwitting collaborators: 'My NAME is Burroughs I AM TRAGIC./ Man’s inhumanity to man/Quote/ fucked up fucked up/ MOCK COLONIAL.' Concretion as accretion.
— Greg Thomas
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John DeWitt, Sardines (no publisher)
I don't know how you get this, but out there in the world there are these pieces of paper with words on them by John DeWitt. It's a broadside in three sections called Sardines, extracted from what rumour has it is a 200-page long sequence. This is a supreme poetry of double-take, complex after complex. What you think of as speech turns out to be writing, and what sounds like song dissolves into laughter. 'I dreamed I thought I bought a cow, the word / and the dream came true upon recollection'. It's his Prelude, duh. Before Ian Heames became JHP's full-time sorcerer's apprentice, Face Press was supposed to do a book of John's called The Neckless Spokesperson of the Garden of Earthly Delights, but it's being held hostage. In the mean-time you can get the impeccable 20 20 Pretzels from Materials. Right in front of us all along, a great poet. Get with it. Sharpen your ears on your eyes.
— Luke Roberts
Editorial note: John DeWitt's The Neckless Spokesperson of the Garden of Earthly Delights was published by Face Press in 2019. As of December 2022, it's still in print and available here.
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Ellen Dillon, Butter Intervention (Veer2)
Butter Intervention — part documentary poem, part micro history — traces the development of the dairy industry in rural Cork and Limerick. Here Dillon (author also of Sonnets to Malkmus (SAD Press, 2019) and Morsel May Sleep (Sublunary, 2021) gives a voice to the commodity itself, allowing it to explore the many ways that food and food culture is part of the everyday making of a nation. Radical alternatives for the organising of communities and industries are hinted at, but ultimately this is the story of how colonialism and 20th century capitalism have foreclosed any such possibility. Butter is able to tell its own story here, but ultimately it is and has been but an onlooker stuck in frozen exile and forced to witness the the unsteady start/stop efforts of workers' soviets and community led co-operatives. Just as E.P. Thomson sought to liberate the poor stockinger and Luddite cropper, Dillon seeks to liberate the wild eyed idealists working in Limerick creameries and the country women forced to immigrate when factories closed in Tipperary. In the same way that each block of Kerrygold is uniformly packaged the image of modern Ireland is smooth, glossy and uncomplicated. Butter Intervention deconstructs this faultless image to make visible the incongruities behind it.
— Connor May
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Gareth Farmer, Kerf (The 87 Press)
In Kerf, Gareth Farmer reaches towards his own autistic poetics, one that goes beyond ‘making do with the oddity’ to fully embrace the experience of living on the spectrum. The result is a text where language embodies texture, and the meditative practices of hyperfixation and routine inform structure. Working through Farmer’s love of woodworking, he approaches the text as he would a physical project, searching through the grain of the language, smoothing problems into the materiality of the finished form, and shifting the visual structure of each individual poem to suit its utility. The kerf, in woodworking, is a blade measurement whereby a woodworker is able to predict how much will be lost when a piece of wood is split in two. Farmer writes ‘Gotta make those notes just in case of deviance,’ and applies this methodology woodworking to his poetics, creating something measured and precise yet utterly idiosyncratic.
— JD Howse
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Jackqueline Frost, Young Americans (Pamenar Press)
Mostly in 2022 I gritted my teeth, dismal and gloomy, so compiling such a list feels disingenuous. Still: Jackqueline Frost’s Young Americans would be one of the better books in any recent year I could care to recall. These sequences are works of maximum pathos, sustained grief, resurrection music, the cadence of passing cars. To want more than survival, to weave in and out of poverty and war, violence, treachery, the rest of it. In the end maybe it’s a device for making courage — a collective form, a relation, turned towards sun and future — set against heroism’s petty magnetic pull. Can a poem do that? Clear and absolute? I believe so. I felt it.
— Luke Roberts
Ali Graham, Wreathing (SPAM)
In this crown of softly wayward sonnets, Ali Graham folds glimpsed linings of coats and poems and bodies into each other via a recurrently openmouthed asking: ‘what grammar to long in’? Small fragments in inverted monochrome highlight surround and exceed the sonnets, each fragment beginning with ‘O’. With incremental apostrophe glancing off while also holding ‘what you had been almost to say’, this is circlusive lyric (to borrow Gloria Dawson’s term), where ‘I’ and ‘you’ practise tangent and return. Slight utterance iterates queer desire to ‘geomorph’ bodies and intimacies in ‘that planetary / way of your doing I want to move you’, while swervily, feeling gathers ‘over the tectonic / plates’ lunar dry scraping’ and the changing shape-shadows of faces and birds across beds and cliffsides and valleys. Wreathing won’t hold a position except ‘a more that is inverse’— steal lie-ins to reread it in loops, horizontally, slipped into pockets of want’s intangible objects.
— Katy Lewis Hood
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Lily Greenham, Tune In To Reality! (Distance No Object)
Lily Greenham (1924-2001) was a writer, performer, artist, and musician, whose rigorous refusal to adhere to the presentational norms of any one of those media was central to her persona. Her 1974 book Tune In To Reality! has been republished this year by Distance No Object and it’s a treat for lovers of neo-dada and the slivers of space between music and poesis. Poetry as a branch of the performing arts, as Bob Cobbing put it. The arch-modernist credo of transnationalism seems particularly relevant to Greenham’s work. She was born in Vienna — where, as a young woman, she became integrated with the Vienna Gruppe of poet-performers who predicted and predated the activities of the Fluxus Movement — but lived during the course of her life between the Austrian capital, Copenhagen, Paris, and London, where she finally settled. She was fluent in at least six different European languages. The sense of cleavage between vocal sign and its object in Tune In To Reality! is perhaps rooted in a polyglot’s awareness of the range of functional uses to which any phoneme, syllable, or even word-length sound might be put when working across a family of scripts and tongues. Opening poem “ability” gets the point across:
adaptable adaptable adaptable adaptable ableableableableableableableableable aptableaptableaptableaptableaptable adapt apt adapt apt adapt apt apt opt apt opt apt opt apt opt aptoptaptoptaptoptaptoptapopt opt opt opt opt opt opt opt opt optout
Hard, clear, singing, rational nonsense.
— Greg Thomas
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Aurelia Guo, World of Interiors (Divided Publishing)
I had been anticipating this book for some time, having previously read and much admired Guo’s NYT (Gauss PDF, 2018). Like the earlier book, World of Interiors reads at least in part like a kind of modern cento, assembled from numerous (though often uncited) quotations. Most of these quotations can be easily traced back to their sources via the nonpareil junkspace of the internet. We find that the purloined texts have been abstracted from newspaper articles, magazine features, advice columns, academic journals, and other places. Whether the excerpts present as serious records or as the lurid tokens of a non-biodegradable refuse, Guo weaves them together with signal concinnity, such that they collectively become something else, shot through with the dialectical energy of purposive arrangement. Punctuating these cento polyptychs are more traditionally ‘authorial’ pieces — sections of autobiographical, socio-political, or legalistic prose. As a whole, the book works to repeatedly confound simple notions of home and hinterland. Even as subjecthood fissures and coalesces uneasily, the text is marked by an undeniable defiance. As Guo says herself, the book is testament to 'how strong and indomitable the will can be.'
— Colin Leemarshall
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Danny Hayward, Loading Terminal (The 87 Press)
Reading Loading Terminal, I can’t tell if these poems deplete or sustain energy. I grow terrified and amazed at this fatigue that won’t burn out, that can’t. Charged and compulsive, these poems are like defenseless mechanisms, sweating out images, looping global politics at your local Costa. Yea, reading Loading Terminal, I am stressed, then brought into a clarity I don’t know if I want. As Julia Kristeva says about the abject, 'getting rid of it is out of the question.' But let it be said, too, that this book is a feat in content — its imagination, never hallucination, working extremely hard to make sense of the world.
— Jennifer Soong
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JD Howse, Just Meat Not God (Hem Press)
JD Howse's Just Meat Not God uses the viscera of Francis Bacon's paintings as its ink. Seeking inspiration from an artist as bold as Bacon poses the risk of being overshadowed, but Howse translates his vision of the paintings from canvas to page with confidence. These ekphrastic sonnets, each named after its corresponding painting, construct strange geometries of their own, expanding on the pain and strangeness of existence characterising Bacon’s work. Much of the poetry concerns the amorphous nature of being, passing from one state to the next, blood leaking from all orifices. The book opens with a quote from Bacon: 'I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence as a snail leaves its slime', setting the stage for Howse to gut the images and use their innards for a study of something new - from ‘Self Portrait, 1990’: ‘In masking yourself / every inch of a face / contorted into disembodied strokes / of human emotion / will eventually / & in the right light / become a death mask’. I love this book for making me feel mortal and weak, a slash of crimson in the darkness.
— Kaisa Saarinen
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Kirsten Ihns, [five poems] (Earthbound Poetry Series)
Since I became a parent, both the rate and the intensity of my poetry reading have suffered inevitable attenuations. Short offerings such as those in the Earthbound Poetry Series are a solution of sorts. One of my favourites this year was the Kirsten Ihns entry. In ‘some theses on fear’, Ihns writes: 'i have an epistemically weak propositional attitude, it may be here or / here it is'. If you’re the type to snigger at the ‘epistemic’ undulation of that line, you will likely find much to enjoy in these five poems. The umwelt I inhabited while reading was deliciously compelling and funny. It was also disorienting — never quite paratactic, but definitely diffuse at the joints. From ‘rester’: 'dust mote day hair, the floor, speeding up / ‘the floor is speeding up,’ that’s Sharon Olds / Sharon Olds is a ‘great runner,’ theater, entire / total & brutal'. These fragrant semi sequiturs had me feeling like some kind of Tantalus, teased with poetic victuals that kept receding as I reached for them. Given the exiguousness of the Earthbound print runs, I’m surprised to see that Ihns’s entry still appears to be in stock at the time of writing. Act fast!
— Colin Leemarshall
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Discovery Jones, Michel Platini’s Microwave Pizza (Thantasma Press)
If Discovery Jones knows how to write a coherent poetry collection, he's kept that secret to himself, because nothing about this book works logically, but it is somehow beautiful. This collection includes such gems as: 'When the moon turns / to dust, / what shall we do then? / Sit around the fire, / and listen for its voice / like a summer camp killer.' There is a line in 'About Flowers' that is so perfectly, precisely stupid that the reader has to stop and think about it: 'Flowers like / to have their necks snapped / for no reason.' If you like poetry with a little attitude, you'll like this book. Some poems that begin as love letters end as political diatribes, and some that begin as surrealist exorcisms end as tributes to John Donne and Christina Rosetti, though it seems as though Jones has read neither. Some people can't get enough of a good thing, and that's what Discovery Jones offers: a great, great deal of poetry. It's like finding a good bar in a sea of mediocrity. It’s like finding the sun at night when you're lost at sea. It's the stuff you wake up to when you are young and beautiful and you're young and beautiful.
— Aaron Kent
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Robert Kiely, ROB (Broken Sleep Books)
‘[I]f they don’t own very much when they finish their “education”’, Tom Leonard writes in the essay ‘The Proof of the Mince Pie’ (1973), ‘then at least they’ve acquired the right habit’. Rob’s ROB sometimes feels like post-it notes stuck to the inside of the overpriced pie lid and snuck into the exam, tasked with figuring out the grammatical and class (im)possibility to be ‘in but not of it’ with depreciating adhesive. Across the long poem-essays, ‘Dissonance and Authenticity’, and ‘Plonk & Plaint’, the ‘bottom drops out’ of categorisations that organise the conditions of study and studying-with, via acquired habits that have lost their referents, and readings of work by Laurel Uziell, Maggie O’Sullivan, Frances Kruk, Nisha Ramayya. The shorter poems start heaping with claims – ‘it is a manager’s credo / that sleep is not living’, ‘Some slugs think they are caterpillars’, ‘the greatest poem is waking up in the same bed’, ‘to mourn is kettled’ — yet heaping makes its inverses; ‘there is no need to prove it / because it is not a proposition’. Sharply, vibratingly ambivalent regarding the conditions of its own writing, ROB upsets the ‘formula’ of learning loss, violence, value — rips and riffs off, generously.
— Katy Lewis Hood
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Sylvia Legris, Garden Physic (Granta)
One of my favourite things in a poem is a list. If I’m putting a list in a poem it feels like nodding to the unknown pups of my greenhouse or indulging a guilty pleasure to classify and collect. It’s not that I want taxonomies to be rigid and determinate, but that I want their boundaries to glow all the better to imagine contamination. I’m not doing an Adam but being unmade in their naming, ‘Seeds within seeds’. I love this strange eclectic collection for all its botanical abundance and masterful lyric precision. What do we do with the ‘livelong organs’ — ‘a catalogue, a desire, a wish’. To tell the truth, I’ve not finished this ‘florilegia’ of poems from start to finish: Garden Physic is more like a guidebook I pick each time sincerely I have the thought about growing something new in language. How do we do it? By parts, glitters of bits, floral inscriptions, the randomness of enchantments. I wanna graft bits of these poems onto the furniture of daily life so to enhance my houseplants with their sticky, linguistic equivalents. If you’re looking for ~hybrid poetics, Legris will teach you the healing properties of renewal (‘My faith in deadheading’), in good shit (‘No quaint, no dainty’) and ‘A good great ghost of a garden!’. Delicious, epistolary, pharmaceutical, additive, blooming.
— Maria Sledmere
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Karen An-Hwei Lee, love chronicles of the octopodes (Ellipsis)
What’s it like to be a cosmically displaced octopus created in a gene lab with the mind of Emily Dickinson? 'You must figure this out on your own in the rainy dark of the universe, awake.' Chasing the question down with the osmotic urgency of a liquid detective, Karen An-Hwei Lee’s Love Chronicles of the Octopodes is an ink-cloud of real mystery, a record of the experiential surplus that overflows any attempt to make sense of our most basic and holy predicaments. The language is plated and dexterous, an exosuit for contemplations that has no trouble craning into the weird shapes they demand. Philosophical, xenosagacious, exquisitely attuned to the soul-kicking improbabilities that animate it, Love Chronicles is a fugitive experiment in confessing the unreal truth of our all-defining displacements.
— Ian Dreiblatt
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Fran Lock, Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press)
In Forever Alive Fran Lock gives us the ‘fractals of a black nest, forensically vamped’ and the ‘unrequited gekkering of rusty ghosts’. The mood and tone of these poems is different from those in last year’s Hyena! Jackal! Fox! and I’m reminded of Geraldine Monk and Elisabeth Bletsoe quite often, especially in the poem ‘The Moors’, which is written after John Clare. Here Lock deterritorialises the English she is forced to write in (á la Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of Minor Literature) by inserting into it words borrowed from Romani, Hiberno-English, Gaeilge, Cant and Shaetlan. These poems know how our lives are measured down to the last detail, how the weight of our pelts has been measured in terms of wealth, how those who are denied become those who will refuse. We sleep all day and wake exhausted. We have no home and there is no point in ghost hunting because, as Sean Bonney says, we are the ghosts. To read these jugular poems is to enter a hateful song aslant. Lock has covens in her mouth.
— Connor May
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Ian Macartney, ! / Object (SPAM)
What is this? As the refractive index of thousands of crystals on an LCD screen make pixels make a text make an image (an object?), this pamphlet might be `Liquid in my hands In my mouth’. Ian summons a glitchy Virgil who — through poems that clutter & swirl with `cosmic profanity’ — guides us through bolgia of comment sections, misheard lyrics and Taco Bell. Charlie XCX, SOPHIE, Beyonce, et al., become imbricated as 'Another day flickers in our heads’ as reality is raised to the power of 5. What is the flicker? The poems cast this digital inferno as the aftermath of a houseparty where `Empty cans Broken glass Pieces lie in my sink’. A noxious flickering of addicted attention waking up in the kitchen where the ‘Four ponyboys’ of the Apocalypse are saying 'Hi :('. Take this pamphlet and read eat it in the Taco Bell on Sauchiehall Street. It has ‘atypical goodness’.
— Jac Common
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Hugo García Manríquez (trans. The North American Free Translation Agreement), Commonplace (Cardboard House Press)
The appearance of Hugo García Manríquez's Lo Común in English, brought forth by a collective of poets and translator under the name of the 'North American Free Translation Agreement' (NAFTA), might become a welcomed shock to the ways the Anglo-American avant-garde has thought of its internal workings, its textual and political work. This is a significant and long-awaited event. Commonplace deploys the form of the long poem and found items from Mexican state defense budgets as a scrutinising infrastructure, where the atoms of so much of modern poetic expression — these moments, these abstractions, aspects gathered together, aspects kept apart — are envisioned as attack helicopters and armoured personnel carriers, wrenched together and apart from the extinct and endangered creatures they share a national space with, and are occasionally named after. The effect is like reading a catastrophic litany, an index of forms, discourses and methods which nest within themselves forms of immanent critique: the general rebellion of animals and objects against humanity in the Popol Vuh; the masses gathered inside and outside the baroque Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, speaking languages unknowable within the threshold. Commonplace feels like that rarest of things, the language producing a new critical capacity.
— Mau Baiocco
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Alice Margaret, Crooked Spectrum (self-published)
Alice Margaret offers a kaleidoscopic poetics translated through the medium of touch and tactility. The text, unpacking a spectrum of ‘pavement’, ‘chicken of the woods’, ‘small intestine’, ‘swamp’, ‘malachite’, ‘clearblue’, and more (poems vary across individual copies), is delivered through a series of micro-poems which navigate the infinitesimal boundary between flippancy and sincerity. Engagement with this book is a haptic experience. Each page bears the textural indent of the typewriter strikers, paint palettes layer and crack across the poem-as-canvas, the reader rotates each page around a titanium rivet to access the text. Crooked Spectrum was distributed at the London Small Publishers Fair this Autumn and is soon to join the National Poetry Library catalogue.
— Briony Hughes
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Lila Matsumoto, Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype)
Lushly fell back into Matsumoto’s poetics with Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water. Mostly, it was the arcing domesticity and frills of ecological glee that caught me. The image of the peacock looking at its own image on a shiny car’s reflective surface. Matsumoto knows how to layer images together so that they lie there in a spectacular jumble. I remember reading the collection and enjoying the way it soaked up a ray of sunshine coming through the studio window; a grounding force amidst a whirling year
— Alice Hill-Woods
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Connie Minerva, Faggot-Noise! (self-published)
Glasgow artiste Connie Minerva gifts us with another zine of punk smut. If her first collection, Homo-Silence, was about reaching a yearning hand out of the closet to brush the cold veneer of gay culture, then this follow-up is what happens when desire sends you tumbling into the sticky underbelly of it, to roll around in the stink of bodily fluids, shame and God himself. It stretches beyond want and into NEED. The central poem about a loving and violent T4T transplant blows my mind. Collaboration animates all of Minerva’s work and the poems become a part of the visual accompaniments from other artists: words dripping from cocks, blades, and hanging bodies. The packed-out Faggot-Noise! launch at Bonjour in early December featured an eerie soundscape, sculpture and a film backdrop as Minerva pushed the pamphlet into the world with a birthing cry from start to finish. I can’t wait for the third zine in the trilogy next year. Consider the bar raised.
— River Ellen MacAskill
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Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Madness (Nightboat)
In collecting the poems of Luis Montes-Torres (1976 - 2035), Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué deftly reinvigorates the possibilities of heteronymic writing for this decade of slow collapse. Montes-Torres is, by all accounts, a poet who fails in the manifold ways that poetry today can fail: a footnote in the archive, an object of minor recognition and confected curiosity, ancillary but not crucial to the great shifts of our time. Yet his fictitious poetry sparkles with didactic discomfort, an attempt to put stress upon a language still not open to the intimacies of exile, ecological catastrophe and fleeting pleasure to be found in the present and the near future. 'I am handing out microscopic fires' writes Montes-Torres, the element of transformation brought to bear on the minutiae, the irregular fixations and lifelong commitment to probing the question of what poetry is and what it can do. Perhaps it is easier, as Anne Boyer says, to get at the difficulties of a writing life by imagining it from its posterity — from the worms that will read it and the buried clay jars where literature resides in its utmost freedom. The collected poems of Luis Montes-Torres occupy this rare space, a posthumous breach in our imaginary: 'Forecasting / by waving my wand over a pile of my bones, I say a picture / is like a portrait.'
— Mau Baiocco
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Redell Olsen, Weather, whether radar: plume of the volants (Electric Crinolines)
Redell Olsen’s new collection focuses on the useless noise of data collection to explore how abandoned information can have an untold utility and relevance. Across the work, Olsen explores how women’s contributions are excluded from the development of technology such as radar, how said technology is then employed in ways that exclude vast amounts of data in favour of singling in on small, profitable data sets, and draws explicit parallels between presentation methods of data analysis and the visual scoring of music across history. Returning to a long-standing interest in ‘the animal’ as a liminal symbol, Olsen explores how insect ‘interference’ with weather data radars can be used to tell us more about the climate crisis, the information we value as a society, and our relationship to the natural world. Olsen’s treatment of sound in the collection is fascinating, presenting certain sections as Opera, engaging with the work of John Cage, and exploring the aural qualities of words in short sections that almost sound like insects buzzing 'as though to be: / thought itself / forgotten / later / as though to be:' It’s a dense, complex work that avoids easy answers and rewards multiple readings.
— JD Howse
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Katie O’Pray, Apricot (OutSpoken Press)
apricot by Katie O’Pray is a life-size soft fruit with a hard core. No matter how sour, the sweetness pushes through in moments like:
sunlight onto an orchard. an easy blue cheesecloth over the world.
The poems in this collection manage to be both playful and sharply urgent, and the poet is constantly surprising us with their language, images and line breaks. Here is a strong voice building us an identity while being in a body that is fighting falling apart. Bodies and food are two notable forces at play in this exploration of life and survival. This tension is built beautifully with images and moments, some more dramatic as ‘white knuckling a large sweet potato’ while others more soft and humorous: ‘a hungry glitch / with custard’. The language moves in and out of the body, taking with it various types of love, violence, light and shapes. The second section of the book WHO WAS THERE WHEN THE WORST WAS HAPPENING? WHO WOULD COME IF WE PHONED & ASKED? takes this even further through relationships. These brief moments of intimacy are so generous and demonstrate wonderfully the complex soft fibre structure around the hard heart / stone of life, poems, the apricot.
— Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir
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Tamas Panitz, The Country Passing By (Model City Books)
I stumbled upon US-based poet Tamas Panitz during the pandemic through an edition of Transmissions TV guest-curated by CA Conrad, in which his work featured.
The Country Passing By is a gorgeous feast of poetic delicacies steeped in a deeply sensory lexicon. Playful and original, the poems are beautifully sculpted — glinting assemblages of imagery and idea that surprise and delight, dancing off the page at every turn; often delivered in a Stein-like tone of instructive assurance that leads one to conclude yes, all of this is true.
From beneath blankets of thorns children rise, rows of stars grow corn becoming children becoming steam powdered emeralds in delicious bread
A window into a psychedelic consciousness, this book invites you to shake off the shackles of narrative and embrace the wonder of the cosmic linear – a realm rich with imaginative and existential possibility. Impressionistic and witty, little mines detonated in my head as I read it, and it’s a collection I’ve no doubt I’ll keep returning to.
— Poppy Cockburn
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Sandeep Parmar, Faust (Shearsman)
Something I love about a poet reaching their pinnacle is how the brilliance becomes casual, a matter of habit and not exertion. The way the calm, confident, panoramic ideas unfold in this book is a wonder to behold. Few poets more thoroughly deserve their roses.
— Dave Coates
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Alycia Pirmohamed and Éadaoín Lynch (eds), Re·creation: A Queer Poetry Anthology (Stewed Rhubarb Press)
In their foreword, Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo writes: ‘This earth is laced with love’. The poems of Re·creation are all ‘shimmer and blooming’ (Jack Biggleston) with the secret meshwork that goes on in language, to bind and let slip. Thoughtfully assembled, there is space here for both lush burgeoning (‘my chrysanthemum bloom’ in the work of Jinhao Xie), audacious alchemy (‘gay jesus / turns water into buckfast’ according to Mae Diansangu) and hardcore techno (in Patience Agbabi’s ‘Josephine Baker Finds Herself’). It’s a generous education in contemporary queer poetics, which also means a lesson in the slippery flesh of the (desire) line — as per the book’s namesake in Audre Lorde’s own ‘Recreation’. It means going full Aphrodite, with speech acts to call love from even its failed weaving — ‘Now / I must speak’ (Lady Red Ego). Love here is all kinds of incarnation. I love the words and the spaces between them: how they might ‘suppose the body’ (Oluwaseun Olayiwola) in lyric proposals of scale and tense. I’m endlessly revisiting the ‘harmonics beautiful gorging’ still in Nat Raha’s ‘elegy for callie gardner’, remembering what Callie once wrote about poetry as ‘a little naked worm’ and for the love of this burrowing, poetry could make it possible to say, in the words of Joelle Taylor, ‘everyone is still alive’.
— Maria Sledmere
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Betsy Porritt, A Mediated and Partial Zone (Guillemot Press)
Betsy Porritt’s A Mediated and Partial Zone truly is ‘a gift going both ways’, all distance and spanning and lives. Ever attentive to the ever-shifting definitions and potential of (un)lived spaces, Porritt’s poems can often feel like a kaleidoscopic encounter with the magnificent and banal materials of existence. But rather than simply laying out a grand old beautiful mess for the reader to languish in, the work reaches out and asks of us ‘what belongs / speak friend crack apart the sea / strip ready, soft bough’ or to ‘sing / silent bread histories’. It does not rest easy, it does not truly rest. It is a continual reminder to be present, to shift in dissonance to the lives expected of us. To ‘exhibit on a different scale’.
— Kyle Lovell
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Tawnya Selene Renelle, Prompts (orangeapplepress)
Prompts starts the way poems often start, with a list of things the poet wants to write about. Then the line between a list and a poem blurs. You’ve begun so why not write a bit more right now, while the germ is in your head? If you’re lucky, and you’ve been doing your exercises, it runs.
Renelle presses lockdown time through this sequence, scissoring up what feels like one big serve under 30 diaristic titles like ‘After being in a crowded place after months of going nowhere’. Her kooky processes sustain us past poem-breaks to wherever the mood of the writing day has brought her attention. Poem form is double-spaced single lines, with occasional tercets whose three lines each begin with ‘about’. A satisfying meta joke sees a habitual ‘use X’ phrase (X being anything from ‘nosegay’ to ‘Be careful’) usually followed by ‘X’ in the next line, immediately used. When she breaks the pattern it’s like an actor breaking the 4th wall.
Prompts doubles as a set of writing prompts to we reader-writers, but its notes to self notate a notable self. WE SEE YOU TAWNYA SELENE RENELLE and kind of adore you.
— Iain Morrison
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Olivia Robbins & Kara Hondong, Slay (self-published)
‘Slay’, self-published by the poet Olivia Robbins and the illustrator Kara Hondong, is a playfully painful foray into deranged femininity. The zine opens with a poem called ‘Leng-Sword’, joyfully clashing high and low: ‘slay Holofernes / drink the blood from splayed / arterial veins / inferno in my pelvic line / craft danger in my own design / leng-sword leng-sword leng-sword / dancing / on the dance floor / foil your theory by embodying / the blade not everything is / a phallus when everything / screams of pathetic phallussy’. These are poems with a high-pitch fervour for life, even when they spiral into violence, as in ‘becoming bisclaravet or the woman who doesn’t smile’: ‘sometimes i’m so hungry i eat my own vomit / i’m my own spurned lover / ripped off half my face for this / becoming something else / rhizomatic flux this isn’t an allegory / im a bitch no really no really no really no really no really really i am a bitch’. The writing is interspersed with Hondong’s red-hued illustrations, close-ups of butt plugs, beast horns & undefinable shapes, as wonderfully off-kilter as the poems. I love this zine because it’s pure mischief and melancholy, like holding a friend’s hand on the way home from afters, smiling with bloodshot eyes.
— Kaisa Saarinen
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Kaisa Saarinen, Voideuse (Feral Dove Books)
Voideuse by Kaisa Saarinen might appear as a small pink book but is a collection full of dangerous sharp edges and grand gestures of love, hate and melodies. While the poems ‘scrape the ceiling / of their unholy observatory’ as written in 'Grasping', the prose work is wilder, scratching, biting, blood-boiling, not just scraping the ceiling but bursting through it — and then licking the shards of glass. There is not just energy but force in this collection. Forceful scenes and violence are met with inventive language which surprises, shocks and genuinely tickles. ‘Recently I’ve been horny for domesticity’ is one of the very original sentences in the book, sad and simultaneously a welcome comic relief. This creates a nice balance between lust, fun, excitement and more difficult subject matters. I think the poems 'Source Codes', 'Uniform of Affection' and 'Heatwavw Diary' are especially notable — and the first one especially for its exciting use of digital language — and one of my favorite titles from the collection must be 'i have no need for a man inside the leather jacket'. I return to this collection repeatedly, both for the gentle ‘mottled lilac memories’ and to ‘absorb the meanest suckerpunch with glee’.
— Karólína Rós Ólafsdótti
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Kashif Sharma-Patel, croydon modernists / old pretenders / suburban release / a non-place (a Suburban release / Turf Projects: ‘Cultivate That’)
‘NO FUTURE UTOPIA NOW’: This micro-pamphlet is Croydon. More than the Croydon of Kate Moss and that unfairly maligned ponytail; it’s a Croydon flexed through the dérive, writing itself through and out of kitsch commodity mono-gloom into the heterogeneous affective smog(s) of ‘play[ing] linguistic flail’ for collective ‘social-poetic release’. In a brilliant blog post, the poet explains, ‘the cultural form is both an actual iteration of its content, as well as re-presenting an image on its own terms.’ This pamphlet-as-Croydon then, produced as part of a residency at Turf Projects, includes poetry, photography and collage/décollage (a nod to Jamie Reid’s situationist-cum-punk practice and zine, Suburban Press). This is a poetics of suburban swerve, of re-purposing ‘outer-city’ modes of spatiality and withered modernist utopias, side-stepping the bi-polar dialectic of failure-and-not-failure, to amble toward something beyond drab utility or ‘revolting conceptualism’. Moving through ‘CPB territory’ and the atrophied built monies of major modernities we, with the poet, search for ‘some catalytic meaning’, becoming the pirouetting life that winds through ‘back roads’ and ‘cr0 lyrical entrapments’, to reveal a syncretic cyclonic sociality of the street: ‘pukka fare’ and ‘calligraphic sweep’, ‘gotham stylings’ and ‘the blissed out Baconian swelt’.
(See: https://turf-projects.com/croydon-surrounds-suburban-release/. There is also a fantastic sound piece in collaboration with Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer here, incorporating the writing from the pamphlet.)
— Sabeen Chaudhry
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Kat Sinclair, Please Press (SAD Press)
I first saw Kat Sinclair read from Please Press at Camden Arts Centre. What struck me was the breathlessness of her performance - hilarious lines whipped past as quick as the traffic on Arkwright Road, also in earshot. But it was a candid freneticism, conversationally casual, and these poems carry that incendiary mix onto the page. Please Press is combative, at fisticuffs with itself and an imagined gawking public, attempting to process grief gone bureaucratic while a baby screams on the train. The frenzied anxiety of the 21st century everyday, its stationary and kitchen utensils and paperwork, becomes typified in the automated calling system which renders individual struggle another unit in the audio-queue, as the title alludes to – but it’s also a plea, Please Press, to put pressure on a surface-world and pierce into something else (like the cover’s evocative letter opener through sheafs of what, actually, does not matter).
— Ian Macartney
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Maria Sledmere & fred spoliar, sans soleil (Face Press)
If, as Sara Ahmed suggests, mood is something like a relational atmosphere, then this pamphlet is a big mood of ‘all you can eat light’, ‘cast thru fierce aureate’ and giving ‘fisheries of asterisks’. Written collaboratively in flares of excess and restraint, it feels like a hot intra-subjective volley of communal methodology against the cold strategy of singularity. Sweating the contingencies of undulating solar socialities; the planetary, the cosmic, the meteorological is rendered political, always already ‘material-discursive’ as Karen Barad might say or otherwise ‘in luxe ellipsis’. The poets address obliquely, the inequitable anthropocenic mediation of sunbeam and energy, harm and waste: light as ‘inconstant commodity’ or the ‘snowfall of overuse’ or ‘botching crops in the forest blues’. (I think here of Bataille’s solar anus or Etel Adnan’s tyrannical chameleonic sun that can nourish or slaughter.) But sans soleil is also a poem of quotidian ‘emotional cumulus’, stereoscopically slipping between ‘What lights / us into dailiness’ and ‘the stupid idiom of bliss’, ‘an exorbitant teardrop’ and ‘hurt by timesheet’. Somewhere in between shade and getting burnt, we catch ‘a counter-logic’ or a longing for ‘Tomorrow’s dew’, evaporating into a ‘formless’ rotation; an asymptotic desire to ‘stoke the late, less toxic light / to gather’. sans soleil sizzles in the albedo of its solar slalom, sun or none!
— Sabeen Chaudhry
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Jennifer Soong, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit)
Inside the smooth, hunter green cover is a brand new weather: this lyrical ‘fog’ that renounces itself to the freezing air, ‘wind twisting the words along’. There is space in this book to track patterns of thought as they crystallise in language and flake into material form, or don’t:
The poet I read about experiences not a surplus of tears but a lack of them and by this am I to make my life available
With a premium economy on weeping, what about a phenomenology of poetic speech as coming into self: which is to say, complicity, reason, memory, labour, purpose. Deliquescence of context.
Soong’s SPAMphlet, Contempt, is ‘after Sappho’, and here the fragment persists under the sparkle of the period ‘. / . / . / .’ drizzling between lines. If lyric is oft a crying device, here it weathers the impossibilities of daily life: ‘everything you know is wrong / yet you’re living as you are’. There is beauty and bathos, resonating with a vibe of Verity Spott, Lisa Robertson. ‘Tonight my REM / will be like water cutlery’. Soong calibrates an image to ‘ripen’ inside you with this prickling intimacy, a foil, a cloud, an embellishment. We swallow the fog.
— Maria Sledmere
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Kathrine Sowerby, (FIND YOURSELF) AT CONSTANT FALLS (Blue Diode Press)
I first encounter Kathrine Sowerby’s (FIND YOURSELF) AT CONSTANT FALLS at an autumn launch, on a crisp evening at Typewronger’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. The refrain ‘Find Yourself’ that runs through the book acts as a kind of incantation during the reading, and also as a reminder of the strangeness of being, existing and living through a pandemic. I am suddenly thinking how passive that utterance 'Find Yourself' can be, but also how it can function as a command, a direction. This collection of tender, looping, cascading prose poems feel both porous and tightly held; in fact, I am held by them as I read: ‘….you are learning to be kind – you are kind – to let things matter, to let people matter. And not just because it’s fashionable’. These poems enact a curious rotating mirror, and accurately convey the modes of thinking and logic required for everyday survival: ‘Find yourself standing. Holding on. Facing front. The bus moving from side to side. Socks pulled up to your knees. Listen, it’s work, you have to take it, you have to turn up and be prepared, as if you care about your subject.’ I find enormous comfort and disorientation in this collection and I find myself wanting to write too.
— Kirsty Dunlop
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Andy Spragg, OoP (Veer 2)
So many great books out there, but the poetry 'community' is small enough that it proves difficult not to recommend a book by a friend, or published by a friend, or tangentially connected to a friend. It's also toxic enough that the inevitable overlook will leave me feeling sad and icky. Poets. I love them all, but I cannot embrace them all. However, I've also started a form of psychic defence where i back myself to the hilt. It's called Hubris 2022. It's working for me and I'm recommending it to you. So I recommend OoP by Andy Spragg. It is the book of the year, by virtue of collecting the books of the last ten years. And because if you aren't writing the book of the year, what are you even doing.
If you are going to read a second poetry book this year, you should read the following: anything published by Veer 2; anything published by Distance No Object; anything by Gong Farm; anything by 87 press; Will Alexander's Refractive Africa. Also, prove you are legit: if you can afford it, make a regular donation to the Poets' Hardship Fund.
— Andrew Spragg
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Madeleine Stack, CHAOS REHEARSALS (Canal)
Madeleine Stack's CHAOS REHEARSALS traverses a universe of mucked sororities (at the water park, the depot, under the nuclear towers, hospitals and apocalyptic weathers, 'with the ladies who know'), striving to head into and at the same time disinter something like the erotic abundance of bodies in unbounded movement, to the point where 'flesh blurs upon its owners touch'. Its strategy is announced as 'to enter, however / planning diversion', the poems broken up by photographs which could come from a walk along a weathered, desolate beach but which all suggest portals: a cave opening, a rockpool, a fossilised garment, a ruined doorway. This could be the most aquatic set of poems I have ever read — capturing how the body is only ever in hydrostatic combinations with its outside, vaporous or 'sweating indecently', drinking or possessing 'a stomach storing your juices for a rainless month'; health and illness (and lovesickness) all a matter of the conditions, and to whom, you bear your fluids to. This is a book about the erosive potential of rehearsing and returning to those scenes, the way these can pool into and carve dents and escapes from the oblique authority of property (and propriety!) all around us. I love it.
— Mau Baiocco
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Stacy Szymaszek, The Pasolini Book (Golias Books)
How did I come to love this book, with its response poems, its 'emotional translations' of Pasolini, its reflection-revision of an essay, 'A Sentimental Education', which I think of as the book’s belly? Maybe it’s the way this book is free, for me, from any anxiety to appear modern, urbane, or new. Maybe it’s the stately presence of the stanza, the way a line like 'I had just been delivered into world that wasn’t ideal and realized the sorrowful gift of myself' still calls on you to acknowledge the 'world,' 'sorrow,' and 'myself.' I think I came to love this book for its accumulation and acknowledgment of not just lived time, but also, lived place. It’s interesting — at least to me — that one of the longstanding centers for New York poetry has been a church. Between Pasolini and Szymaszek, spirit and politics ('the evil of the day a new billionaire') hold one another accountable.
— Jennifer Soong
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Elizabeth Train-Brown, Salmacis: becoming not quite a woman (Renard Press)
Elizabeth Train-Brown’s Salmacis was the perfect read for me this year. Using Ovidian influences to question gender binaries through an exploration of — and against — the body, I found myself nodding along yes yes yes as I tore through these poems. Queer nymphs? I’ll take it.
ovid tells it best i sit in a bath with pink bubbles cupping bits of my body that I don’t recognise this is my lake salmacis and i am the wild nymph with a hollow in her belly and nothing between her legs
— Marina Scott
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Cassandra Troyan, Against Capture (Veer2)
Cassandra Troyan's Against Capture is a poetry arrayed against all forms of domestication. Smash the clocks, strip the locks or get fucked by an angel — it wouldn't be accurate to say this book contains themes and tendencies so much as unconstrains them, as if the essential anti-cop tactic of the de-arrest had a poetic relative. The result is an ensemble of refusals coordinated in ever-proliferating ways: 'I'm ready to join society / with my body bruised to the point of / celestial capture.' These are poems that know the surplus produced by the erotic as a tactic and a strategy, our collective reserve across borders and species. To write it like this is to return to the practice and stakes of the love poem. Little else this year has felt as joyful, exciting and intense as this collection. A dancing bomb.
— Mau Baiocco
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Lizzie Violin, City of Geist (Southwest Residue)
Lizzie Violin's City of Geist is a poetry collection that defies the book-within-a-book motif to tell a story from the point of view of a young woman at a boarding school who, after being introduced to a book of poems by an old mentor, tries to create her own version in which she envisions the city of Geist. I was struck by how these poems subvert typical meta-fiction in several ways. The book within a book genre was first popularised by J. L. Brisimmo in one of the short stories in 1932’s Laboratory, in which he set the standard model for the genre as involving a book of fairy tales that is also itself a book, much like a Russian nesting doll. Yet while Lizzie Violin also includes a copy of the book as a poem in the collection in both the first and last stanzas of her poem 'Resplendent Shark Attack', she also reveals that she is the author of the book itself. Further, while she uses the format of a traditional book of fairy tales, she takes advantage of the more flexible poetic form and subverts traditional expectations by filling it with non-fiction and science texts.
— Aaron Kent
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Alli Warren, Sundial (Nion Editions)
Look, ‘Astrology is real’ okay and Alli Warren’s new book is totally brilliant! Many times this year I lost my way and needed strong poetry consultation. Handily, this sun-golden slim volume of two long poems (‘Personal Poem’ and ‘Sundial’) is a reimagining of Alice Notley’s ‘The Prophet’ (1981). The lines of these poems are wise, soothing directives: ‘You long to abide clock-less time by fields of shimmering’ is essentially the whole schtick of what I want from poetry. Fuck Siri, I’ll trust this speaker with just about anything. There is so much abundance, plainspoken, hitting at the nuance of daily feelings and this atmosphere of love’s risk, sexy among the steaming garbage. ‘It’s not the sun you see but everything it touches’. This work gets us away from ownership, from labour time and what Sean Bonney would call the ‘solar cop’. Sundial reminds us that we are alive and there are good things like blood oranges, geese, vanilla tapioca. It’s hardback as in a luxe hold for buttery gentleness, all the better to lean on.
— Maria Sledmere
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Brian Whitener, the 90s (speCt!)
When I read Brian Whitener’s The 90s I think about the stupid past and its inability to elapse, its instead endless dispersal through the present, abasing and sustaining us. Beneath the globe-rattling clamor that extractive violence and networked domination make settling into their new configurations, the book traces out a language in which we can confront a cursed, formative history. 'it’s THE 1990s, narrative is not enough, and if we just spin these pronouns around fast enough, we could create a given, I mean, a body, for us, a problematic pirated body, neither furry nor plastic, neither nodal nor oddly enough, a beautiful given, a shaft, adorned in gucci'. A book that, through its meticulous excavations, opens up just enough past to make it seem fleetingly possible to envision a future. It’s as funny and icky as life. I need a few more decades with it.
— Ian Dreiblatt
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Writers’ Shift (The Fruitmarket)
Writers’ Shift is the astonishing result of a lockdown project wherein five poets (Janette Ayachi, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison and Tom Pow) responded to the history of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. From freewheeling ekphrasis to found poems to discursive poems to candid reflections on gallery labour to Ian Hamilton Finlay-ish blasts on the page (green text!!!), the contributions here are truly innovative. Also refreshing in how critical they are of the capital which scaffolds the art world, its kyriarchal past. The anthology feels open and democratic in its intellectual rigour, toying with the archive, playing with the art — an endearing appendix towards the end, where other employees of Fruitmarket got invited to contribute, speaks to this. Special shoutout to Shola von Reinhold’s great essay in here as well.
— Ian Macartney
If you feel we missed something crucial from the list, why not pitch a review to SPAM Plaza? We're always keen to pass the megaphone and hear your takes...
Where possible, we encourage you to order direct from the publisher, or why not see if your local bookshop can order it in for you?
With deep thanks to everyone who contributed to this list, to the Plaza, to our pamphlet and magazine series, events and anything else SPAM this year. We will be back soon.
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Illustrations by Maria Sledmere
Published: 18/12/22