BOOKS

HOUSE OF MOUSE

2018

From the publisher:

"Discursive, playful, obscene and satirical, The House of Mouse is a collection of ten poetic collaborations written by British poets SJ Fowler and Prudence Chamberlain - each responding to a famed cartoon, each uncovering the bizarre overt and covert symbols and signs of these pervasive animations.”

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Realised through a number of conceptual performances, face painting, playing princesses, and embodying Bambi, the text is paired with a number of accompanying illustrations that represent and challenge the original text and original films.

COTERIES.

2018

‘We're reminded (who am I kidding? I'm reminded) how coteries can function for resistance and solidarity - also for kink, for flippancy, for flirtation, for retreating to the private as much as asserting in the public sphere. One poem languorously weaves in and out of "The sexual act / of eating / tomato soup" All the way through these poems are moments of delicious wit and playfulness with language. A really rare daring. They make me "hum like a tuning fork", as O'Hara said of Char and Eluard and Lorca.’

In Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, Lytle Shaw puts forward a radical, provocative aesthetics of intimate coterie as the basis of O'Hara's work. Not merely stylistic, an aesthetics of intimacy and particularity "hijacks universality". These poems constantly do that; they puncture the grandiose, and the pompous. I love this book a lot!

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​Colin Herd, Adjacent Pineapple

RETROVIRAL*

2018

‘Chamberlain has a rare and piercing ability to invigorate the 'personal as political' from a solemn, facile or familiar truism into a more uncomfortably playful, prickling and vulnerable wit. In *retroviral, a space of bodies abstracted in textual bodies, the reader finds flippancy and the terminal quarrelling with mortality and the dress-down desperation of casual. In this daring and nervous agitation of text, poems itch beneath a shadow of waiting: the threat of infection, a change in government, the growth of a relationship, and the ability to understand any of it through, from, and as, words. This is a poetics that braids as in unravels; found material walls up against the unfounded 'I' which imagines the infected 'eye' and then - through gaps, erasure, fear and anxiety - travels into versions of lyric proximity. Bodies recognise connection, desire finds shape, words are blocked or rush into new meaning and, with lacerating humour, Chamberlain begins to piece together a tender panic of intimacy, one that is 'contained & overwhelming / in plasterboard and continual repairs'.

- David Spittle, Veer Website 

I SPEND MY TIME ON YOU TOO MUCH

TBD

This collection is a consideration of/ writing through what it means to live with grief, where Death becomes an embodied figure who runs both literally and figuratively through the text. These poems are backlit by a narrative on Dickinson, which thinks about how we cite, construct stories, and the myriad ways in which the poet is determined by others. Thinking about citation in the work of Maggie Nelson, Lisa Robertson, Ben Lerner and Emily Critchley I wanted to play with what the page could offer and what a praxis of citation could look like in relation to the poet’s after life.