Published by The Gig, 2009, 259pp. The most substantial collection to date of cris cheek’s ‘poems performing thematic extraction’: mud (and fluff), fogs, squat, broom sleigh, plain speaking yet, canning town chronicles, short life housing: texts begun in the 1980s & ’90s and worked through into the 2000s.
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‘is your tongue a glom / weapon that stains?’ cris cheek is the Kepler of Chisenhale Dance Space. After a century of developments in poetic form best understood as a series of metaphors for transcribed speech, cheek’s poetry often is transcribed speech, throwing shapes on the page that pay homage to (and lay the ghosts of) all the dead metaphors. As in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the speech in cheek’s work functions as something like echolocation: its reflections (on him and in us) mapping out an ever more complex and multifocal shape for the public sphere, ‘where others fear to / t / read’. Peter Manson
‘For all its thickness, unanticipated moves, visual beauty, and playful language acrobatics, the poetry of part: short life housing consistently retains the edge of serious critique. There are few poets as attuned to the sounds and ambient fogs of everyday life as cris cheek, yet his record is tuned and sharply turned toward the reimagining of social knowledge. This volume is a generous move towards the full representation of cheek’s crucial project.’ Carla Harryman
‘Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here’s an artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and composing them back into the dense abstract neighbourhoods of his pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is a Londoner and as such is inhabited by Dickens’ dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcherite city. That’s at least two hundred years of grime, greed and energy you’ll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink splashes of this great volume.’ Caroline Bergvall
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