New Book! Count-down begins
I’m overjoyed to share with you the official web page for my new book — my first full poetry collection since 2011 — now live on the CB Editions website!
Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle was only written by chance — I felt stuck, and struck a bit dumb, after lockdown, so I cut up a book and used some phrases as stepping stones through drafting a poem. Then another. Then another. It seemed to be working, so I kept going.
The other way of looking at it, of course, is that it had to be written; the poems exploded onto my screen as I typed, leaning on Kenneth Patchen — old poetry dad of my adolescence — for scraps of help, and they kept on exploding until I knew it would be a whole book.
The poems were written between September 2021 and September 2022, and form a sort of diary of that awful year.
Here is what a few early readers have said about the manuscript:
‘How do we survive our contemporary moment? And how do we articulate that survival? Project Patchen says language is a strategy. The writing that emerges is supple, muscular, and innervating. These are nervy, driven lines, but they also channel something of Patchen’s directness and clarity.
‘There’s no cathartic release, no striving for an empathetic sigh. There’s only an accounting and a holding to account. No one is saved and no one’s off the hook. That’s the beauty and the bravery of it. The horror of it too. These are poems from the class war. These are poems from the war on women. These are poems from and for a world that will not look poor women in the eye; for a lyric sensibility that drains their rage into pallid depoliticised reservoirs of poetic sentiment. None of that here. But a humour and an honesty that persist despite it all. No little dramas of abjection, but real life.’
– Fran Lock‘These poems demonstrate what can be drawn from the chaos of our times. It is a brave, brilliant, intoxicating body of work.’
– Nancy Campbell‘These formally dexterous poems centre around a personal narrative of belonging and alienation that explodes into a series of furious hymns to the downtrodden and forgotten, both past and present. Complex, political, and somehow exuberant: a bracing rollercoaster of a book.’
– Jacqueline Saphra‘Partly an elegy to Kenneth Patchen, partly mimesis, and partly a way into her own poetic world, Evans-Bush’s poems use fragments and push into Patchen’s aesthetic but are wholly her own.’
– Sean Singer
Like most other people I know in the poetry world, I’ve been a massive fan of Charles Boyle’s impressive one-man show, the elegant and quietly subversive press, CB Editions for years. Nothing could make me happier than to be published by him. And though I don’t celebrate either the conditions of, or the reasons for, these poems of mine, they are work I feel I can be proud of. Some of the poems were published in various places online, and you can find links to them here and have a look.
The book will be out on 6 February, and you can pre-order it now.