God Mode

Synopsis

A queer body horror epic from the dialysis ward.

A vast system crash in the virus garden. Matthew Haigh’s second collection is a single, electrifying sequence on chronic kidney disease, dialysis, transplant and the body re-entering the world. With the cut-up wit and pop-cultural intensity that made Death Magazine a Polari-longlisted debut – now grafted onto something graver and more interior – God Mode tracks an illness through hospital wards, faux-medical letters, surgical theatres and the haunted spaces of online life. It is a queer survival narrative, a body horror, a prayer book for the age of the algorithm. A book about being saved, and what is lost in the saving.

Praise for This Book

‘In God Mode, Matthew Haigh renders a ‘skin theatre’ of multimedia sickness, loaded with uncanny imagery, dirge-like humour, and moments of naked vulnerability. At its centre is a glitching, buffering body rebelling against obsolescence and a hyperconsciousness crawling with parasitic dread. Haunted by looming hospitals, spider-eyed doctors, and vending machine sandwiches, these poems leak into one another, zooming in, zooming out, associating and disassociating. Beauty and brutality are jarringly juxtaposed: filthy bedsheets beside bluebell gore, goblin mode indistinguishable from god mode, body and mind equally bionic. A mortifying reading experience – in the best possible way.’ —Poppy Cockburn

‘Matthew Haigh writes about the out-of-bodiness of being ill as if the body itself is the backrooms. These poems contain existential terror of watching from afar as something awful and life-changing happens to you. Poems written from the toilet bowl, the waiting room, from the bed as the world moves past you through the window and the phone screen. Blending pop and digital cultures, online terminologies and medical language, God Mode exists on a plane separated from the land of the healthy.’ —Joshua Jones

‘Matthew Haigh’s God Mode accesses levitation abilities, visionary utterances, synchronicity recognition, post-life awareness. It’s a collection that emerges from and countenances life-threating illness, but in a way that’s astonishingly joyful – though the poems are stricken and luminous, painful and bewildering, shocking and consoling, comical and horrible, they somehow discover a revelatory transparency in the churn of everyday life, its JPEGS, omens, underworlds, unselfings.’ —Sam Riviere

Praise for Previous Work

‘(On Death Magazine) Exquisitely crafted, elegant and dark dark dark. Poems that nudge me to up my game.’ —James Knight

‘(On Death Magazine) Funny, sharp, touching and completely itself. I wholeheartedly recommend it.’ —Mark Waldron

‘(On Death Magazine) Matthew Haigh’s poetic voice, full of edge and depth, is contemporary and captivating, and Death Magazine is certainly a book not to be missed.’ —Astra Papachristodoulou

‘(On Death Magazine) These blackly humorous poems give an incisive yet touching look at what it means to be human in a post-human age.’ —Book, Bell & Candle