English in Mallarmé 

Peter Manson

With an introduction by Ellen Dillon

Manson reveals English words hiding within the original French text of Mallarmé's poems.

'These pages are strewn with shreds of words: unevenly dispersed, semantically uncomfortable in each other’s company, they stumble together to make momentary meaning before drifting apart on the white space of the page.'

Rides

Marcus Slease 

“There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be

a pirate” said Kathy Acker. This is pirate literature. On a train.
Partly inspired by Ted Berrigan’s Train Ride from 1971,

Rides has a reality hunger. A mash up of memories and 

observations on train rides all over the U.K.

“A moving stage theatre,” 

“A special mission with a Mormon bodybuilder,” 

“A donut the size of your face called the TexASS.”

The speaker is “staging the room for their own pornography.”
Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise make a special appearance in their epic blockbuster Far and Away on a train from Brighton. Natalie Portman’s dress appears on a train to Brighton. The “psycho southeast harbor” of Folkestone is an inferno of the shirtless being stuffed with chips. In Norwich children slide down a slide into a graveyard.The soundtrack is Pussy Riot and The Raincoats. Rides is a sad romance. “A gravy moat with mash potatoes in the middle.” Personal and personable, the speaker of these poems doesn’t “want to be

clever” they just want “to be real.” Domestic expansive and full

of truth nuggets: “If you paint a person / with house paint

they will live / if you don’t paint / the bottom of their feet.”

Here's Marcus reading a selection from Rides

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Richard Barrett

Richard Barrett’s new book Free has the title it does and contains the poems it does. The first of those is called AN UA and in looking like a short story or something really doesn’t look very much like a poem. It is long. And maybe Barrett might have read some Ron Silliman and possibly one or two other LANGUAGE poets. The poem is diaristic. It is confessional (as many of Barrett’s poems seem unfashionably to be). It is a love letter to Manchester, Cambridge (though not ‘the Cambridge scene’), and, also, a certain person who might once but most likely doesn’t any longer have lived in Cambridge. It contains a lot of comings and goings. Most of which must be considered sadly rhetorical. The book’s second poem, The Red Rec, is a frankly baffling re-write of Eliot’s The Waste Land centred around the once trendy but perhaps no longer so ‘youth presenters’ Jameela Jamil and Nick Grimshaw. The poem was delivered to Barrett in a dream; Jamil and Grimshaw taking turns to imprint lines upon Barrett’s sleeping brain. The following morning he arrived 3 days late for work due to having to frantically scribble the poem’s lines into his A4 refill pad. ‘Why Eliot?’ Barrett dreamed he asked Jamil just before she announced what had come straight in that week at Number One. There is some funny stuff here. There is some serious stuff as well. What is intentional, what has happened by accident though just isn’t clear at all. Penniless Poetix is this mercifully short collection’s final piece. It is a companion piece of sorts to The Red Rec – appearing to comment meta-ly on it. It is a manifesto. It is a statement of poetics. It addresses the riots which broke out across the UK including in Barrett’s hometown of Salford during summer 2011. It is a state of the nation address. Again, it doesn’t look very much like a poem (what actually is up with this guy??).  It contains, or at least seems to, unlikely references to Adorno (probably Wikipedia’ed). It wasn’t written in Stockport. It mentions Ariana Reines. It points the way to the future. Okay, perhaps not mine or your future, but for sure, afuture. Should you buy this book? I guess so. The publishers are really groovy and deserve supporting.