BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Jul-08 | ISBN: 9781844714216 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 80pp | Format: Hardback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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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

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“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

“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

“Suffice to say that Evans-Bush is a strong poet with a serious future in this bailiwick.” —Jo Hutchinson Perpetual Bird blog

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS

“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

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

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.