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In a world where everything has more possible explanations than ever before, where no experience seems real unless it is refracted, this book examines love, loss, and time itself under a variety of lenses: these poems are made from other poems, from paintings, from songs, from spam emails, snapshots, jokes, dreams. We are the experts on our own existence, but what does it all mean?
Katy Evans-Bush has been praised for situating poetry in the heart of daily life, and her second collection is written in deep engagement with the sounds and colours of real and imaginative worlds. The French writer Nerval's pet lobster takes us on a vibrant summer's outing in nineteenth century Paris. Two playwrights in two centuries ponder happily on their unseen downfalls. A child dithers on a hot day, and a lover resorts to pure tactile expression at the moment it means the most.
A sharply-lit American childhood is seen as if through a telescope, from amid the mists of London and its layered lives. Ordinary objects act of their own accord; art speaks to us more than the person standing beside us; and the core of love remains the same while everything around it shapeshifts. One thing is certain, though: an egg is never just an egg.
List of contents
- Contents
- Talk
- Thibault's Ribbon
- Speculation and Conjecture
- The Grand Disjuncture
- My Hero
- Steam Across the Quad, Baby!
- dear m magritte
- O Let Me Not
- 1599: He Looketh Happily Across the Thames by Bankside
- Fretwork
- The Love Ditty of an 'eartsick Pirate
- In Which the Playwright Reflects on the Nature of His Existence
- Hope Like Heaven: a Shaggy God Story
- Hell
- Radio Silence
- It's a Right Birds' Nest
- The Night is Dark
- & outside by the stream the colours were so amazing
- Richard Price
- The Fabiola
- You're in Bedlam
- Meditations on a Freudian's Lip
- After the Gasometers
- The Starvefish
- Billy and the Days
- Intelligent Album Rock
- Forth in July
- The Desiring of Practically Everything
- Overland Homesick Blues
- Connecticut Postcard
- The Desert
- Freefall
- What's Time
- And Across the Harbour a Solitary Skiff
- Animate
- Hansel
- A Christmas Play
- The Mountain Goat and the Mermaid
- The Base Macian
- A Few Squibs
- Bisects
- The Best Scarf in London: a Picaresque
- Henry in Love
- Spring in Baker Street
- This Was the Pace of my Heartbeat
- Away
- On a Note by Louise Bourgeois
- November 30, 1900
- Hammershøi
- Notes
About the author
Katy Evans-Bush was born in New York City. At the age of nineteen she moved to London, where she now has three children and a no-pets clause. An editor in the not-for-profit sector, she writes essays and reviews as well as poetry, is a regular contributor to the Contemporary Poetry Review, and is the author of the literary blog Baroque in Hackney.
