Katy Evans-Bush

Biographical note:  Katy Evans-Bush is the author of Me and the Dead (Salt, 2008) and Oscar & Henry (Rack Press, 2010). She writes the well-known blog Baroque in Hackney, edits Salt's online magazine Horizon Review, and is a poetry tutor for the Poetry School. She lives in North London.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718221
ISBN:  9781844718221
Author:  Katy Evans-Bush
Title:  Egg Printing Explained
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-11
Extent:  88pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  132 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In a world where everything has many possible explanations, Katy Evans-Bush examines love, loss, art and time itself under a variety of lenses. With humour and imagination she shows that the core of love remains the same while everything around it shapeshifts; and that an egg is never just an egg.

Main description:  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.

Table 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

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Excerpt from book:  

Steam Across the Quad, Baby!

Oh man, those Sunday lunches
before the Quad got bought and sent to a cat
with red eyes, who could never forget
the one just like it he sold ten years ago —
you all Ollie in a pinny and me Stan,
mincing and whisking past the pantry door, or
stopping to change LPs, find some Benny G’s
to score, Yeah, baby! That’s the sound the kids call
stirrin’ in the cream, the goulash boogie,
cookin’ up a Gershwin casserole,
now don’t you dare touch that orange-rimmed dial!
The smooth-faced dial that spun like a dream
and smiled sidelong at you in front of the stove, hey kids!
Let’s put on a show! — but the kids
are upstairs being 14 — oh,
who cares about them, down here it’s steam
and even the empty bottles are toppled by the sink,
Sing, Sing! the weekend gone,
and lunch and the night ahead of us; then Krupa
comes in with his famous solo bang bang
bang! and we turn up the volume and you act out
the time he did it with matchsticks on a matchbox,
with Barbara Stanwyck stood by in some squaresville dress,
tapping her arm and trying to look hip — hep — not
like us, Ollie — and Gene just goes crazy, and we always
say they must’ve glued the box to the table,
the way he’s going it could never have stuck like that.

Unpublished endorsement:  Egg Printing Explained is an immediately likeable, lively and readable collection. The poems crackle with invention. The book is a dance of language: dramatic, comic and exuberant. What is especially dazzling is the cavalcade of forms and registers. The poems shift in mood and music from plain song to baroque, from chant to rock, from blues to opera. Her phrases surprise and delight and no reader will ever forget the exhilarating and brilliantly sustained ‘The Love Ditty of an ‘eartsick Pirate’. This is a sharply-written book from one of our sharpest wits. But it is also one of the most generous and melodic books of contemporary poetry I’ve read in some time.

David Morley

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 on Me and the Dead