I'm delighted to announce the publication of a new book from Knives Forks and Spoons press, my collaboration with Sarah Kelly, called Ways of Describing Cuts...
Sarah and I collaborated over maybe a nine month period, last year mainly. Her work has an intensity and a clarity I admire greatly, and I knew writing with her would improve my practise because she in genuine in her engagement with experimentation and language. She currently lives in Buenos Aires so we're not really able to launch the book properly, but it is wonderful to have it in print, it is such a beautiful object and something I'm proud of.
Always pleasing to be a continued part of the Knives Forks and Spoons endeavour too, I truly believe, in time, what Alec Newman has achieved over the last few years, will be seen a vital moment for British innovative poetics. The cover for the book is also a wonder, by the remarkable British artist Joel Ely http://www.joelely.com/
The book costs £5 and is 22 pages long. You can read a sample here http://knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/Resources/WAYS%20OF%20DESCRBING%20CUTS.pdf and very generously this is what Sam Riviere and Robert Sheppard had to say about it.
'These poems seem instantly to surpass the benign conversational format of much poetic collaboration, instead arising from a violent and impulsive sort of play. They wound us as all good poems should, but, staring each other down from the ends of the page as if from opposite sides of a room, the real drama becomes in how the pieces vie and rally with each other, somewhat like combatants in a friendly knife-fight, matching taunts, comparing their quick cuts for deftness. But there's flirtation and approval beneath the show as well -- the poems appeal to each other as much as they aim to appall, teasing, correcting and provoking, meeting each others' lunges with unexpected gentleness. Like the best friendships or dialogues, we find the players alternately at odds and back to back, until any simple sense of opposition is overcome, seeded with generosity and enjoyment, demonstrating how in such fruitful encounters as these we can in the best possible sense 'fail to maintain our solidity'. Sam Riviere
'Dogging among dock leaves, these dogs are people. Experience collaboration as (deliberate) mishearing, conversation as alliterative iteration, juxtapositions as jousts. ‘Not a poetry,’ the text lies. The lyric ‘I’ bifurcates. These two writers keep it tight, irresistible. Fresh cuts from two new tongues.' Robert Sheppard