Fidelities, Ian Seed

Ian Seed says of Fidelities, ‘The poems here range from the lyrical to the more experimental, but I think that they all probe and explore a series of encounters and journeys.  I see them as being faithful, “in their fashion”, to the truths they discover along the way’. This collection enacts an excursive articulation of the world and language, the shifts and creative repetitions found in both, between words and inside words, between moments and within moments: each poem finding its distinct poetic imperative to reveal these moves in the landscape in complex and subtle ways. The rhythms of these poetic journeys involve but also exceed the sonic; here is the shaping of the space and time of attention, a focus and intimacy that situates and then opens up, and into, our embodied encounters with the phenomenal world; here is presence, and reflection on presence and on being present. This is language as an eye that sees and a hand that touches and shapes, but also as ‘skin listening’. ‘We do not see from our bodies as from inside /a box. We pertain to the whole, we take our place /in the landscape, in the touching of the sleek and rough.’”
Patricia Farrell

Out now on The Red Ceilings.

zimZalla at The Hardy Tree

Films from the opening night of the zimZalla exhibition at The Hardy Tree gallery in London, co-curated by SJ Fowler’s Enemies project, are now online. The event also celebrated Mark Cobley’s The Red Ceilings Press. Tom Watts is seen above, with more here.

The next event is October Monday 27th at the Hardy Tree with readings from the TRYIE Collective (Zuzana Husarova, Olga Pekova +), Tom Jenks, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Kim Campanello, Ryan Van Winkle, Iain Morrison, Christodoulos Makris.

S J Fowler: Recipes

Out now on The Red Ceilings Press.

Incredibly, SJ Fowler’s recipes turn into poems as soon as you read them: exotic, nonsensical, provocative, furiously funny, but also tender and intimate (in their own way).

Don’t try this at home.   – Frédéric Forte (member of the Oulipo)
If this is some of what he ate where, then SJ Fowler also swallowed Antonin Artaud whole, calmed his stomach with bumblebees and psychedelics instead of milk of magnesia, and then started pogoing. These recipes are in the grand tradition of The Futurist Cookbook (offeringchickenfiat; elasticake; simultaneous fruit), and Harry Mathews’ famous “Country Cooking” (bludgeoned with an underwater boomerang)– and provide food for thought for the hungriest of readers. Binge and purge!  This little book has completely cured my lactose intolerance.           – Dr Tim Atkins (author of “The Atkins Diet”)
SJ Fowler squeezes the lemon and lime and shame all over Pee Wee Herman’s full English breakfast. He drops a pineapple in the Virgin Mary’s favoured bucket. He has done things you should not cook and done them deliberately with aubergines. He cleaves to the bat and the ruined ape. These are not necessarily bad things.     – Tom Jenks