Katy Evans-Bush

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Biographical note:  Katy Evans-Bush was born in New York City and moved to London at the age of nineteen. She lives in Stoke Newington with her three children, and writes the literary blog Baroque in Hackney. This is her first full collection.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714216
ISBN:  9781844714216
Author:  Katy Evans-Bush
Title:  Me and the Dead
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-08
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In Me and the Dead Katy Evans-Bush writes about life and art, death and love, from both sides of the Atlantic. “Like a post-sisterhood Millay” she casts a cool eye on the vagaries of modern life – its laissez-faire sexual politics, its pretensions and its little ironic betrayals – and parses out with wry humour the ways in which we occupy our emotional surroundings.

Main description:  In one of the best debut collections for ages, Katy Evans-Bush rises to the challenge of finding words for our times, meeting them in the nurseries of children or the battlefields of Iraq. Her work is various, educated and promiscuously open to experience: a Bishoppy moose makes an unepiscopal escape into TV's ‘Northern Exposure’ as its name morphs through Muldoonian games; Catullus is translated into rougharse while the title-poem takes the pulse of modern death. She makes good use of her joint passport into British and American poetry, which now often seem to share a whole language of faux amis, in a book which is stylish and funny, cultured and humane. This is contemporary poetry for grown-ups.

Table of contents:
The Only Reader
The Bog of Despair
Life (a Dream)
The Metropolitan Opera
As the Sun Sends the Sequins on my Handbag Scattering
Here
My Dish
To My Next Lover
East Ten
Dinosaur Opera
Whereas the Strings
The Escape Artists
The Electrical Paradox
Two Egotists in a Hotel
Nero the Beautiful
Across the Lake
Imitating Life
The Raft of the Medusa
Cosi Fan Tutte
Dissection of a Split Second
Between Two Heroes
The Giraffe That Wasn’t There (and the Giraffe That Was)
An Operation in New York
Centre Point
Or Something
After
Moose: an Adventure in Real Time
The Wind
Fragment
The Downs
The Cathedral
Abney Park Cemetery
Scared of Knives
The Huge Husband
Off
Bonfire Nights
Your Ghosts
Our Passion
Sugar Bakers Lane
Dream: the Twelve Dancing Princesses
In Which the Poet Adopts the Shape of a Swineherd, to Little Avail
A Later Letter on Art
The Crash (a Love Letter)
Me and the Dead
The Dive
The Cave
Pity
I See the Hudson River, the Hudson River Sees Me
The Life Mask
The Brass Doorknob
A Crack in the Feeling
This is Happening
The Master and the Future

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Excerpt from book:  

The Bog of Despair

for Liane Strauss

We’d lunched on Greek salad and coffee
in a place with white walls and a skylight,
and when the guy in the corner’s phone
went off in a polyphonic can-can
we laughed without even trying to hide it.

We’d looked in a shop where a scarf
of silk sat waiting for me to buy it,
and walked past a dog in a puddle
of mud, who shook his coat,
but missed us — and we laughed.

The Heath was lovely that day —
the air was full of spring.
We’d walked up a foresty path,
past a rubber hung like a thief on a tree,
full of swag, and we’d laughed and laughed.

We’d walked past the swimming pond
and up the mound of Parliament Hill,
talking about John Keats,
and other people we know, and the dog,
looking for somewhere to sit, and laughing.

But every bench we came to
was engraved in memory of someone
loved and regretted, young, a child,
and I imagined them sitting there
on the slope, or invisibly playing.

The benches sat on the fat slope
facing the concert that is us:
the blink of Canary Wharf,
the London Eye’s diamond necklace.
We read them, and flinched, and laughed.

We turned and started down:
you had to get your kids from school,
and I had a shiny scarf to buy,
and the jeweller’s-window view
of London had ceased to be amusing.

Your new shoes from Paris stuck
in the mud, and we laughed: the Bog
of Despair! We laughed because
we could feel, behind us, up the hill,
the children watching us.

Unpublished endorsement :  The most exciting news in contemporary poetry is not English or American but a mid-Atlantic, old-and-new-world marriage of the two, renewing the verbal contract. In her saucy, brilliant debut, Katy Evans-Bush proves one of the brightest offspring of this marriage. “I lashed myself to the texts of love,” she writes, “as if they were a raft.” Her poems depicting commuters, lovers, friends alive and dead, bigamists “thumbing mobile phones,” scenes on both sides of the big pond, are charged and rigorous. When she reminds us, “Nothing is more dangerous than a weak imagination,” it reverberates with earned authority. The woman alive in these poems is a vital confrontation. She deserves to be read everywhere.

David Mason

Unpublished endorsement :  I couldn’t put it down?! Very absorbing and satisfying at many levels. I’m sure it will have a considerable impact and I hope that translates into sales and prizes.

Ian Duhig

Review quote:  Suffice to say that Evans-Bush is a strong poet with a serious future in this bailiwick.

Jo Hutchinson
Perpetual Bird blog

Previous review quote:  Katy Evans-Bush can tell an offbeat story the way you’ve never heard it before, but wanted to. Her ironised yet romantic fatalism—reminiscent of a post-sisterhood Millay—is a model of wit and restrained emotion.

John Stammers